What you'll learn:

Lecture 1: A Money Burning Ritual: What Is Money, Really?

This lecture begins with a simple act: setting a banknote on fire. The reactions people have to watching money burn (horror, exhilaration, guilt, liberation) reveal something that ordinarily stays hidden: money is not a neutral tool for exchange but a social relation that organises labour, commands resources, and maintains hierarchies of class, race, and gender across the world. By confronting what money actually is, we prepare to ask a more dangerous question: what would it mean to abolish it?

Lecture 2: The War-Money-Bondage Complex: How Empires Turn Money Into a Weapon

If governments and banks are the ones creating money, then what are taxes actually for? And why do we owe them in the first place? These questions, drawn from economic anthropology and heterodox economics, reveal that taxation, debt, and military violence have been entangled for far longer than most people realise. From ancient tributary empires to the modern US dollar system, a recurring pattern emerges: empires bind together the power to issue money, the power to demand it back, and the threat of force against those who resist. Understanding this pattern, the war-money-bondage complex, is essential for anyone who wants to challenge imperialism, because it shows that anti-war politics, labour politics, and monetary politics have never been separate struggles.

Lecture 3: The Petrodollar Trap: American Superimperialism and the Climate Crisis

The US dollar is backed not by gold but by oil, military bases, and the threat of violence. This lecture traces the circular architecture of the petrodollar system: the US military enforces that oil is priced in dollars, oil-exporting nations recycle their dollar surpluses into US Treasury bonds, and those bonds fund the military that enforces the system in the first place. The petrodollar trap locks the entire global economy into fossil fuel dependence, which means there can be no genuine climate transition without confronting and ultimately abolishing the dollar.

Lecture 4: Cacao, Cowries, and Colonial Theft: A People’s History of Money

Before colonialism, societies across Central America, West Africa, and beyond used objects like cacao beans, cowry shells, and wampum not as primitive precursors to “real” money but as sophisticated social technologies for mediating relationships, maintaining obligations, and organising collective life. European empires systematically appropriated these social currencies and transformed them into instruments of exploitation, colonising the very concept of value in the process. These histories show us that the way money works today is not inevitable. It is the result of specific acts of imperial violence, and what was once colonised can be decolonised from the ground up.

Lecture 5: Democratic Money: Basic Income, Debt Cancellation, and Local Currencies

If the dollar system is the problem, what are the alternatives? This lecture surveys real experiments already underway: municipal basic income pilots from Stockton to Seoul, Brazil’s Banco Palmas which combines basic income with a local currency to keep wealth circulating in working class communities, and credit clearing systems that allow people to trade and cancel out trade debts without exchanging money. It also explores the long history of debt cancellation, from Mesopotamian jubilees to contemporary movements like the Debt Collective and Debt for Climate. None of this is hypothetical. People are already building these systems and social movements. What can we learn from existing alternatives? What are their limits and contradictions?

Lecture 6: Tactics for Abolishing the Dollar

The dollar is already destroying itself, but not necessarily on terms that benefit ordinary people. This final lecture asks what grassroots organisers can actually do to weaken the dollar system and build democratic alternatives in its place. Drawing on the abolitionist tradition, where abolition means not just tearing down but building something better, this lecture connects the topics explored throughout the course in order to give some historical examples of monetary sabotage, boycott, divestments, payment and rental strikes that self-organised groups and communities have done in order to undo structures of domination. The question is not whether the dollar will fall, but who will shape what comes after and what can we do about it today?

Complete the course and get the chance to join a live online session with Julio on Tuesday 12th January 2027 at 7pm.