Money on the Left
Money on the Left
Law & Political Economy with Martha McCluskey
Billy Saas and guest-host Ben Wilson speak with Martha McCluskey about the ins and outs of the Law & Political Economy movement. McCluskey is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo School of Law and a progressive institution-builder. She has made foundational contributions to feminist research and activism in and beyond the academy, focusing on interrelations between economic and legal institutions. A long-time organizer of the Class Crits project and president of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), McCluskey has recently spearheaded the new Law & Political Economy Collective, which insists that “a better understanding of law’s role in upholding the present distribution of wealth and state power is crucial to a more just, sustainable future.” McCluskey’s expertise with construction and maintenance of durable institutions for the development and circulation of socially- and politically-attuned critical legal scholarship gives good reasons for hope in this time of great political unease.
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Martha McCluskey, welcome to Money on the Left.
Martha McCluskey:Thank you. It's great to be here.
Billy:It's super exciting to have you. We want to talk about your research and so much more, but I feel like in the current political moment, it makes good sense to just sort of do a temperature check and see where your head's at, your read on the current political situation. And maybe to kick us off, where are you finding hope these days?
Martha McCluskey:I'm finding hope in creative institutions like Money on the Left, for example. And institution building, I guess the situation is incredibly scary and daunting. But I guess it fits with a lot of the things that I've been focused on in my work over the years of why we need to be building institutions that address a lot of different things, but particularly institutions that connect economic ideas and policies with cultural and the social world. So I'm really appreciative of what you do and of some of the other not powerful enough and not resourced enough organizations that are trying to do that work on the ground and change people's basic ideas about the economy, about society, about democracy.
Billy:Okay. Yeah, I know we definitely share your commitment to building institutions for a meaningfully better world. Lord knows there's lots of institutions out there, but we have a kind of specific institution building in mind. As you note, that kind of means that we also don't really expect robust revenue streams to help us build these institutions. Maybe we can start off by talking about your work with APPEAL, the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law. Can you just sort of maybe walk us up to your involvement with APPEAL by way of your research? What brought you to that moment and where is APPEAL now?
Martha McCluskey:Yeah, it's part of our institution building and the institution building that I have made, I guess, a big part of my work over the years. Appeal really is part of a network of institutions. And right now, APPEAL is restructuring, merging to form the Law and Political Economy Collective. And so part of that is that Appeal grew out of another organization that I co-founded back in 2007 called Class Crits. And in part, that was an effort with my colleague, Athena Mutua, at the University of Buffalo Law School to recognize that there wasn't enough focused attention within law on the rise of neoliberal economics and the central political fact of growing inequality and the power that was giving to the right to, in a lot of different ways, to exacerbate sort of racial, gender, sexual divisions and inflame those cultural issues. But the purpose of Class Crits was particularly to resist some of the efforts within law in particular to separate class analysis and economic injustice from the cultural issues like critical race theory, critical feminist theory. So that had been, I guess, institutionally and ideologically, there was this big split. If you focused on economic questions in law and economic justice from an aggressive perspective, you were, by definition, sort of outside of the circles of the work being done on race, gender, sexuality, and various other categories of identity. And so, APPEAL became really active, held a number of conferences, and particularly one on the financial crisis in 2010. And out of that, I realized that it was really important for the kind of work we were doing to connect legal scholars who were interested in this vision with progressive economists because part of the problem of the neoliberal dominance of law during my career has been the reduction of economics, even among progressives, to the basic neoclassical model and particularly to the most neoliberal strands of that model. And it really continues to be a challenge to even get sort of mainstream center, centrist, center left legal scholars and law professors and law students to imagine that we could, that there is a whole long history and extensive, exciting, great work being done in heterodox economics, if you want to call it that. And so the idea of APPEAL was precisely to bring together some of the active groups working in heterodox economics outside the neoclassical model with law scholars, in part because we thought that within economics, also, there wasn't enough understanding of law and especially critical perspectives on law. So the kind of organizing moments of APPEAL came from connections I just happened to have with some economists at UMass Amherst, a big bastion of political, bastion of some heterodox progressive economic work and the political economic economy research institute, PERI, at that institution. And although it went on to be mostly led by law scholars for a while, we had a major conference at UMass that brought in a diversity of heterodox economists and aired some of the debates and discussions within that field, as well as really connecting that group to law. And so we've continued in that way. Yeah, I could.
Billy:Would part of that story be coming into contact at some point, I imagine, with the Modern Money Network and the folks at Columbia who were sort of interested--Rohan Gray, Raúl Carillo, when they were there?
Martha McCluskey:Yeah, that was, it was really exciting back when Raúl and Rohan were students still, when was that? I think it was 2017, we held an APPEAL conference and I think it was Frank Pasquale, one of our co-founders, said, hey, there's these really cool students at Columbia doing interesting things with money because we were focused especially on questions of finance and the financial crisis and the aftermath of that. So I said, hey, let's invite them and give them a chance to speak, hear what they're doing. Oh, I think actually it was even earlier. It was in 2014 that at least Rohan APPEAL analysis workshop and spoke about his work there. So, okay, I go back even earlier. And so it was really exciting to have them and they really fired up our thinking, opened up a lot of creative discussions. And Bill Black also was a part of that 2014 conference and other workshops as well. So it's something we've engaged in. I think we're not limited to or even full of people who are clearly on board and identify with modern money theory, but it's certainly one of the things that we've wanted to keep in discussion and to kind of integrate in different ways into legal analysis.
Billy:I think that that's maybe one of the most exciting things about being a part of these growing nascent institutions and trying to have the conversations that I think we're trying to have is that there's really not much because there's not much existing infrastructure. You need to go out and meet new people and have new conversations in different contexts where you might not have anticipated having them before. It's a lot of new connections.
Martha McCluskey:That's another part of APPEAL, I think, and the new law and political economy collective group that we're forming the beginning of 2025 from that. We already have been working on it. I think part of that is the idea of really being open to newer scholars, younger scholars, scholars with a diversity of institutional positions and to kind of resist some of the, I think, hierarchy that's especially prominent in legal academia of kind of, you know, whose work is is cool and whose work is not. And, and so it's kind of, it's that collaborative spirit that we really try to keep in, in mind and APPEAL, kind of the practice of democratizing ideas that we're hoping will become a bigger part of the larger political universe.
Benjamin:Yeah. To follow up on the, you know, the, the engaging of younger scholars, you know, one of the, And thank you so much for your work in the paper that describes the evolution of APPEAL was giving me flashbacks to reading John Henry's The Making of Neoclassical Economics. And really the way that neoclassical economics pushes out Keynesian economics and emerges through the 50s and 60s and eventually in the 70s, really entangling itself with law in particular to really gain a foothold and its strength. And one of the outcomes of that is really the dwindling accessibility of doctoral training for economists in heterodox economics and i'm getting the sense in my reading of of your work that similar work has been done in the legal profession so i'm wondering how successful has lpe and other groups been at sort of taking back some of that space and as a follow-up right i think one of the things that might be an interesting approach because most of us heterodox economists like myself, we get jobs at teaching colleges, right? That don't offer R1 PhDs sorts of training. If there's an ability to build out sort of undergraduate chapters of APPEAL, where we could recruit from English majors and philosophy majors and history majors and people that would be well suited for sort of the study of class, race, gender analysis, and the history and evolution of these institutions, I think might be a fun way to get undergraduates involved.
Martha McCluskey:That's a really interesting idea. One of the things we've been doing the last couple of years with APPEAL is we've had a series of regional workshops in New York, New York City, that is, And these workshops have been organized by graduate students in economics at the New School for Social Research and John Jay College of Criminal Justice Economics Department. And so the students have been really active in organizing the conferences, deciding the programs, and the workshops themselves have really featured especially student work and student presentations. And actually, most recently, the one we had this October, we had several graduate students from UMass Amherst who were part of the organizing team, especially valuable in that. And so we're looking ahead to expanding that. We have groups of students who have been very active in the workshops as well and have ideas for continuing that work. But in terms of undergraduates, one of our APPEAL board members who's been in the lead in running the workshops is Jami Merted at Sarah Lawrence College. And he has brought many of his undergraduates into the workshops themselves and into various roles off and on for working with APPEAL. And I think they actually have a long political economy chapter there that does some work. So I think there is a lot of room for expanding the energy among undergraduates, although I also think it would be important to have more, obviously, more researchers, more opportunities for PhD work in heterodox economics, especially in programs that would integrate some study of law and see that as more fundamental to many of the questions of economics and economic institutions.
Billy:Maybe we can pull back and get a little more historical or stick with the historical view for a little longer. The division you described and the kind of blockage between different domains of research and legal studies, would it be fair to describe that in terms of law and economics versus critical legal studies? or was the division more nuanced than that even? Can you kind of walk us through the major moments in that history that we've been covering in broad terms so far--of Ben mentioning John Henry's work on neoclassical economics and the law and economics movement--and eventually now, well, with what y'all are doing with the law and political economy? Could you kind of walk us through that story?
Martha McCluskey:Yeah, I think the division is deeper than the law and economics versus critical race, critical gender theory. It's deeper in the even any sort of knowledge was really split, I think, throughout, I don't know, my time. And even throughout the 20th century, I think, and through the present, you're either someone who does work on an economic so-called subject or someone who does work on a cultural subject. It's almost the way legal education, legal curriculums are structured. So that's part of the problem. But law and economics certainly was, I'd say, very focused on widening that divide and successful in doing so. So I think my work, well, I think there's one story about the division between sort of the economic and the political, cultural that's in the Law and Political Economy Manifesto, the 21st century synthesis, 20th century synthesis article that came out of the Yale Law and Political Economy Project. And in around 2020, I think that was. And however, that article is a kind of a different story than I have from my work in law and political economy over the years coming out of Class Crits, APPEAL. But especially that I came to law and political economy through feminism in law, especially, and in a time when I started in legal academia was in the mid-1990s, and the 1996 welfare reform law was center stage in a way. And that framed my whole thinking about economics and helped to build my work in that area. It's an interest in that. And especially that came out of my academic career, one of the most central institutions that for me has been Martha Fineman's Feminism and Legal Theory workshops over the years. And those workshops in the 1990s and going for at least 15 years after that focused specifically on critiques of economic concepts and economic theories from a lens that looked at gender, race, and many other status categories. So that really has shaped my view.
Benjamin:Along those lines, I think one of the really cool ways that you develop your critique of neoclassical economics is that you foreground sort of their understanding of individuality, scarcity, competition, and how that puts things like culture, social and environmental concerns on the second path, right? It's the second stage in the argument. And you begin to develop sort of questions and imaginings of starting with these values first, social, gender, cultural, environmental, and then how that shifts our perspective and our thinkings about value. And I'm wondering, you know, in moving beyond critique, if you could share some of your more positive imaginings about, you know, what the world looks like or how law can be constructed to emphasize one of these positives in the foregrounding of the argument rather than as the second iteration, so to speak.
Martha McCluskey:One key thing that I have taken from the feminism and legal theory workshops over the years and from Martha Fineman's work on vulnerability theory is it's really a fundamental kind of reframing of law. And it doesn't necessarily focus on any one specific policy. I think it's a framing that perhaps says, how do we evaluate law and justice? And, of course, law and economics frames that as maximizing aggregate societal resources as determined by individual subjective preferences in their market transactions, something like that.
Benjamin:Price equals value.
Martha McCluskey:Right, right, right. Except when it doesn't. So I think what vulnerability theory does that directly shifts that frame and shifts the frame away from, I don't know, mainstream liberalism across the political spectrum really is to say, first and foremost, what is the relationship between individual and society and it's rejecting the sense that you can even conceptually divide the, you know, sort of see these as a question of opposition and that even though there are plenty of conflicts. And I think it's the sense that what is the subject of law is the question that the vulnerability theory that Martha Feynman has helped to develop. That's the central question. What's the subject of law? Who is the person who should be the focus of law and government and who's the subject that should be the focus of our idea of social good? What is the ontological basis for determining what the good is? What makes a policy closer to justice or not? And I guess the answer that vulnerability theory provides to that is that everyone, everyone, it should be the human being for one thing, the actual embodied human being, not the formal abstract individual, which could be a corporate person or anything else. It's that the actual human being should be the subject of politics, of economy, of law, of our ideas of the social good. So what does that do for our positive understanding of like what policies we should pursue? Well, I think it helps us see that the fundamental responsibility of the state is not to facilitate individual autonomy as it is in much of liberal theory, both sort of more progressive, more conservative versions of that. And of course, in neoclassical economics, instead, we should evaluate policies in terms of the sense that everyone has bodily needs, has developmental needs, is situated in, embedded in a web of social relationships and institutional relationships. And so the focus should be on how the state's obligation and legal obligations to provide for this universally shared need for collective support, but at the same time being very attuned to the fact that being embodied and embedded means we each have very particularized needs for support depending on that position. And so it, I guess, positive things. Maybe, for example, rather than answering sort of the welfare reform debate questions of, you know, can we afford support for whom? Who is the most deserving? Who is incapable? Whose dependency deserves to be the focus of law and government support? It's a question of how we can develop policies that provide support broadly. It shouldn't be a question of, you know, are men doing enough? Are women doing enough to provide for family care, for example? Should care be given inside the home or outside the home for children? Instead a question of how can the state meet its responsibility and law facilitate providing support for all parents, all children and all embodied beings for the universal developmental needs we all have for collective care, for education, for particularized responses to our developmental needs. stage of life, given our mortality, our susceptibility to various risks, et cetera.
Benjamin:Yeah, I think, you know, one of the one of our common reads on campus here at Cortland this semester is The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate, who's really challenging. One of the one of the themes in the book is the challenging of the mind-body duality and that the functioning of the body influences how the brain operates and the brain changes the body. And then he pushes that forward into the environment. So we occupy. And so his work and upstream medicine and environmental health are all sort of pushing this sort of understanding of healthcare goes beyond just treatment of patients. And I think economics and law could adapt some of these languages of the patients and the environment and, helping to ameliorate some of the inflammation, for lack of a better word that so many of our communities and, spaces that people really have a hard time with it. I just finished an LPE blog that looked at Yelp ratings of retail stores across different types of neighborhoods and map them and demonstrated that they're really much poor customer service and environments for shopping and, you know, historically redlined neighborhoods and things of this nature. So I think there's so much space for creative sort of like MRI sort of analysis through GIS and mapping for thinking through how we would begin to develop the types of policies or ideas for the sort of support of human development that you're speaking of.
Martha McCluskey:Right, right.
Billy:In our conversation with Martha Fineman--which I suggest everyone tune into as a partner episode--she disclosed quite a bit about how her personal life story influenced her turn to what ended up in her sort of development of theory of vulnerability as a sort of basic state or status of the subject. Certainly not asking you to share anything you're not comfortable with, but can you talk to us about how you got to what you got to when you brought feminism to law and to these institution building projects that you've event? How did you end up where you are?
Martha McCluskey:Big question. One story that comes to mind is, let's see. When I went to law school, when I got to law school, it was I was motivated by some of the my concerns about my interest in exploring how people can widely accept something as completely normal, that if they stop to think about it and were really focused on it more carefully, it would recognize, you know, this is really outrageous or absurd or irrational or injustice. And I think the work of feminism in the 1970s and early 1980s was really inspirational or formative for me in exposing sexual harassment because in my undergraduate years in college, there were many, I had professors who were so inspired by the civil rights movement and talking about how we could have overlooked or accepted for so many years the racial segregation in the South, for example. And yet at the same time, our campus was full of visual, very visual and dramatic sort of expressions of misogyny and violence against women and sexual harassment and, you know, what we'd call today rape culture. And they didn't see that as somehow an issue. But women on campus organized and I was part of a group that did some work on that. But the new work at the time in sort of identifying sexual harassment and violence against women within law and the rise of feminist legal theory addressing that was a big motivating factor for me to go to law school. When I got to law school in the mid-1980s, it was on the heels of a somewhat successful strike by the clerical workers at the law school to increase their working conditions and pay. And in response, the women, many women at the law school organized to address what they saw as problems with the gender inequality in the classroom in particular. So we developed this sort of pattern of, of, of like empirically tracking who spoke in law school classrooms and some of the other classroom dynamics, and then going to the faculty and, and asking them, you know, what do you think of this? How can we better support women in the classroom? And we made packs to support each other and to change the classroom dynamics. And one of the classes where we started to do this was my federal income tax class. And we went to the professor and he said, oh, wow, I am all for feminism. I really, you know, I really support what you all are doing. But of course, federal income tax has nothing to do with, you know, the subject of gender. And so that sort of, I took that as a challenge and I said, okay, I'm going to do a paper and address a question of gender. And I was particularly interested in how the idea of income was thoroughly gendered in practice. And it just struck me as one of those economic concepts that seems so straightforward and normal. But when you look into how it operates in the law, it is all about constructing and distributing economic power. That also got me really interested in money, by the way. And before I had any of the insights from the various money scholarship that's been going on with you folks and others. But, you know, the idea that money does not represent value, real value. At the same time, money does create and distribute real value in really important ways. So it's worth paying attention to.
Billy:Yeah, well, maybe we could follow that strand a little bit. Is it as simple as earlier in our conversation, you talked about coming into contact with folks at UMass Amherst and then the various conferences and seminars in the late 2000s and 2010s? What was your contact like, such as it was, with money theory or ideas about money leading up to that point? And do you remember first coming into contact with the money question and how it relates to these issues?
Martha McCluskey:Well, another big thing that formed me, it wasn't academic scholarship directly, but I was working after law school as an attorney in the Maine State Public Advocate Office, which was charged with utility regulation and also workers' compensation insurance regulation for a while. So in that job, the question, the routine question was, okay, what rates are fair and reasonable? And in the case of workers' comp, which I focused on, there was a constant question between the insurance companies coming in and saying, oh, dear, all the benefits for injured workers are just too expensive. We have to raise the rates. You know, the workers are bringing more claims than we expected or maybe more questionable claims. So we have to keep charging businesses more. Of course, the businesses couldn't resist it strongly and said, actually, this is going to be damaging to the statewith some legitimate concerns. And the whole thing assumed that the insurance, the question of what are fair and reasonable insurance rates would be determined by these very technical quantitative analyses by highly paid actuaries, econometricians, and, you know, sort of way beyond what I had any grasp of. But nobody was asking the sort of basic questions. Okay, what's the role of the insurance companies besides just tacking on a profit margin? What are they doing? And how is this financial, this financing system actually governing the whole system? And so that's what I focused on and with some other allies. And, you know, it turned out that we were able to show that there was a lot of room for insurance companies to actually play an active role in promoting safety, fair return to work, to really supporting the businesses, and ending that sort of zero-sum question of, okay, who should we – win businesses or workers. And of course, workers are dependent on businesses. So it's always the businesses who win. So I think that really, that was a crystallizing moment for me in sort of saying that financing is about governance. And it's an enormously underappreciated area to sort of dig into the underlying questions of power and to get out of the really tough zero-sum debates about who deserves to, you know, be the winner and find ways of really shifting our imagination about what it, you know, how some of these basic economic institutions could work better for everyone--pretty much everyone except a few, in this case, AIG's global profits.
Benjamin:Well, yeah, I think the power story is really interesting about how they determine setting rates through these complex algorithms and econometrics. And, you know, we see the same thing in the health economics sort of chapters where they're talking about the efficiency and the cost minimization of markets and these various markets for health services. And then they digress into this complex explanation about how pharmaceuticals price their drugs and how insurance companies determine rates for different classes of people and how they use these different metrics. And, you know, it all becomes super confusing. But one of the things that they never address is that the market is no longer determining the price anymore. Right. And that, you know, we don't really have a good discussion about how we're determining price. And if the market's not doing it, then all the claims of fairness and the starting point that they articulate to protect these market institutions fall by the wayside because it's no longer about equal exchange or neutral spaces. It's about the folks to get to determine who these prices are. So one of the things that stuck out in my reading of some of your work is that discussion of value filters and developing different organizations. Have you come across other sorts of value filters or mechanisms or tools for countering sort of the dominance of the profit narrative and efficiency and cost, etc.?
Martha McCluskey:Hmm. I guess those value filters focused more on how organizations run and the difficulties, the challenges of forming institutions and organizations on the ground, even within the small efforts of a long political economy, for example. How do we bring people together and help them work together across our inevitable differences and, you know, informed coalitions?
Benjamin:For example, if an insurance company was organizing and bringing together patients and doctors and customers along those lines, instead of always thinking about what is the extraction rate or the gateway, you know, how much do we have to stop people from the threat of over-consuming medicine?
Martha McCluskey:Yeah. I mean, it's not about their individual personal values like it is in an organization. I think we're really trying to assemble people in a governing team. I think in the cases that you're sort of referring to that I'm imagining with insurance companies, it's about setting up the systems that will do that, the underlying structural systems. Like with insurance companies, I guess one lesson I come away with from my time doing that regulatory work was that the only way to keep those value filters going in the way that I would want in a progressive, democratizing, egalitarian direction, the only way is to change the interests and the structure of the interest governing the insurance companies. I mean, what we were able to do successfully is to break up the dominance of the private global commercial insurance industry in the state and to form a mutual, basically employer-run, semi-public, semi-private insurance company that arguably better delivered services both for workers and employers to some extent. Ideally, I guess the real solution in my mind was in Maine and in other states to make that insurance should be governed by the stakeholders in a much more subject to much more stringent limits on outside interests. and, you know, to protect a more democratic governance and accountable governance structure. And not only insurance, but especially the information that drives insurance, that states insurance data should be a public good, And there should be rules for public access, public scrutiny and resources for advocacy groups like my office for a brief time in Maine that were able to analyze the data and counter the insurance company arguments. So it's about governance and about more democratic governance.
Billy:Yesterday, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out in an opinion editorial for the Wall Street Journal their plans for the Department of Government Efficiency. There's a number of things we could say about this, but one of the things that's been interesting for me to try to do is to look for the continuities rather than get hung up on the most glaring discontinuity or the most glaring and spectacular aspects of this, right? They're the big heroic entrepreneurs are coming in to fix Washington and Elon Musk is sort of larger than life and offensive character. But comparing the institution that they're purporting to bring or hoping to bring and the effects, the outcomes that they're after to previous administrations. And how this kind of emphasis on rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse and sort of assuming the worst when it comes to government can be traced. You know, a lot of people are making the comparison. I'm not the only one to say this, but the Obama administration, the first Obama administration coming in with its commission on fiscal responsibility--Bowles-Simpson--promising to balance the budget and reduce the deficit and all of that. And I think, you know, one of the things that looking at the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, this way does for us could be to illuminate just how unimaginative the left can be, has been about the place of government in, you know, producing an actually affirmatively better world that provides for a vulnerable subject, right? In ways that the current system doesn't. So I, you know, as someone who is also interested in institutions and thinking institutionally a lot, I'd be really interested in your vision, such as it is, or if you have any, of what it kind of left alternative to something like the Department of Government Efficiency might look like. We haven't seen it at the national or federal level. What would it look like in your mind? Or is that even something we should be chasing? Should it be something completely different in terms of its form?
Martha McCluskey:Wow, good question. One of the central themes of my work across a lot of different topic areas has been challenging the division between efficiency and equity, or could be whether you want to call it economic welfare or welfarism versus redistribution. One of the central, that's been a central theme because I resist what I see among left politics of sort of saying, okay, there's efficiency, but it's not enough. Let's focus more on distribution and, okay, how do we get power for redistribution? And efficiency is somehow a bad concept. And I think efficiency as it's used is a quite deceptive idea, but that the damaging work that happens is in the rhetorical separation between efficiency or maximizing the pie on equity or dividing the so-called pie of societal resources--that the very idea that you can talk about efficiency without centrally making assumptions and implementing major judgments of value and political, you know, contested value-laden decisions and political decisions about who gets what, what matters and what doesn't. So, actually, I think it's really vital for scholars and critical people on the left, as well as activists, to grab hold of the idea of efficiency, maybe not using that term exactly, but maybe using it and turning it around. Because the idea of what is the public good, that's really all the efficiency is about. It can be twisted in any way. The sort of economic stuff around it is never used in a very determinate fashion. It's a way of kind of evading and depoliticizing the question of the public good. So, great. But it's a really important question. What are the resources that really are vital to our shared well-being and to our individual power within a collective system? And so I think that's drawing on the vulnerability theory, for example. It's as human beings, the resources that are the most scarce are not money. The resources that are scarce are our very particular bodily existence and the meaning and beauty and joy that we can get from that. And of course, that includes the environment. And so I think that an office of government efficiency would be great to have a shadow office of government efficiency, maybe. I think it would be really great to draw on, I think, a real legitimate popular sense that government isn't giving us what matters. Now, Elon Musk is not going to be the one that is going to answer that in a way that I think addresses what people are really concerned about. But if we had an Office of Government Efficiency, it would be to say that every, you know, that we should have much more robust supports for health, for education, for parenting, for disability, for all the needs of human existence, for environmental quality. and that it would also provide a sort of, I guess, rhetorical and political details, stories, narratives about the way that those resources are generated, not by private individual transactions, but by the distribution of coordination, collective power, and that the government is central to doing that. Law is one way that access to collective of institutional power is generated. So there's a million ways in which the, yeah, that giving people power, whether it's through unions to maximize the pie of support for workers is one thing, whether giving people the resources to support their families in terms of the developmental and bodily needs of family members, care, environment. So the jobs guarantee perhaps would be central to that.
Billy:Yeah, I wonder if maybe we could, you know, think of a Department of Government Abundance and Efficiency. Efficiency about managing abundance. But then also, yeah, those scarce resources are families, are relationships, are bodies. Yeah, I think I'm into that idea of repurposing efficiency in that direction. I think the other thing that is maybe a discontinuity or distinct about the Department of Government of Efficiency as it threatens to come into existence Senator Musk and Ramaswamy is the kind of unmitigated, unqualified enthusiasm and confidence and zeal that they're bringing to the table here. They are so clear about what they want to do and how they want to do it. And I guess maybe more important than that and more clear than that is there. I think there's an enthusiasm. There's a joy in it. A perverted joy, right? At the expense of others, literally. But I think that so often when progressive left ideas are even tentatively introduced on the national scale, it is with an apology and a doubt built in. And wondering if, you know, part of that alternative would have to be, this is how it is, this is how it's going to go. And, you know, of course, leave out the mean-spirited, racist, misogynist, repudiate those outright. An affirmative alternative that embraces abundance and acknowledges the need for efficiency confidently and enthusiastically. Not so much a question, but a riff there.
Martha McCluskey:Yeah, yeah. That enthusiasm, that energy is interesting. And yes, ambition, ambitious ideas. My work has focused also over the years on the right and how the right in law and economics and in law and economics as a field has been built. really ambitious and ambitious in its ideas, ambitious in its institution building, and ambitious in its confidence in a way in law, which is not what it says in its dogma, in its precepts, but it's been a movement, like the amount of the investment in legal education, for example, and law and economics is huge. And the excitement of building like the Federalist Society and the octopus of Koch funded and Olin funded law and economics, you know, centers, institutions, law school. I think all of that shows an energy for both of these sort of, with some intellectual value, the rethinking a lot of basic premises and institutions and being willing to say, no, we can, we can, you know, radically overhaul the Supreme Court, we can radically overhaul the idea of what it means to be rational as a policymaker, etc. So I'm all for that ambition. I also want to think you're, this question raised, it reminds me of an article I wrote, Are We Economic Engines Too? that talked about the way in which the whole idea of efficiency, of productivity, of like ambitious efforts to jumpstart innovation in the economy and to cut out waste, how that idea is thoroughly gendered. And that goes back to a lot of the, even to my work in welfare reform, like what do we think of as productive and not just gendered, but a construction of masculinity and sort of masculine, white masculinity, white masculine ability to disrupt and sweep away what is an individual. and institute dramatic change, but dramatic change that particularly relies on discrediting, discounting, and to some extent destroying mechanisms of accountability and shared governance. So I think that this idea of putting like a sort of emblem of toxic masculinity in charge or several of them in charge of government efficiency and making law and government into the sense of, oh, that's the wasteful friction. Those are the transaction costs. That's what gets in the way of what really is the source of prosperity and power. Instead of saying, no, where this power actually comes from is, you know, Musk's fortunes have been made on, you know, getting government support and government protection and special deals.
Billy:What's on the agenda for the next year or so, or what are you working on?
Martha McCluskey:I guess, given the context, I am maybe more focused on institution building in various ways than on, you know, writing another article immediately. So I'm working on a kind of jumpstarting this new organization, our newly developed organization, the Law and Political Economy Collective, and trying to move forward with some of the work we're doing with students, particularly and to, you know, more globally and in many ways build a vibrant law and political economy movement, but one that perhaps takes more attention to some of the questions like of gender and of resisting the hierarchies within legal education. and beyond and is able perhaps to engage more on the ground in this time. So that's one thing. In terms of my own work, I'm also interested eventually in looking at nonprofits and the ways in which money is governed and hidden and politicized or not through or mystified through the nonprofit industrial complex here. And that in part comes from the work I did within the higher education system at SUNY on the power of private, seemingly so-called ostensibly private foundations. And I think I'm interested in the ways in which public money is privatized by setting up so-called private or in practice private foundations that are privately governed, often not transparently in a university context, but also, say, by police forces. All kinds of areas of government are being undemocratized, taken out of public view by using the assets of public institutions and public resources to generate private funds that then can be used in ways that would not stand the light of day. So that's one thing, but also the power, I'm also interested in the enormous power of nonprofits to advance industry interests and right-wing interests. The Koch network is a great example of that, but the way in which it's not just a problem of profit that we have to deal with, But the way in which, you know, I think it's the nonprofits channel coordination rights and the power that emanates from that outside of democratic spheres and, you know, against the interests of justice and the survival of humanity.
Billy:Any other places we should direct folks attention to, to look out for some of this work?
Martha McCluskey:Yeah, well, the Law and Political Economy Collective has a website with that name, and we're building that out. And, and that's, again, an umbrella organization that encompasses APPEAL, Class Crits, and an organization that grew out of the Law and Society Association, the global law and political economy network. So, we've encouraged people to stay in touch through that umbrella and participate in our, the events that we're planning on, especially for this group, networking with economic students and law students and building a kind of relationships in that sector.
Billy:Martha McCluskey, thank you so much for your time and for joining us here on Money on the Left. I really enjoyed it.
Martha McCluskey:Thanks. This is great. Appreciate all your work and look forward to more.