From lending to spending of last resort: the epistemology of book-keeping as infrastructural form

This article starts from the premise that IPE has, by and large, a blind spot for the contingency of public, monetary provisioning in support of full employment. Public employer-of-last-resort facilities are often treated as politically or economically unfeasible, or even dispensable. Yet, much like central banks’ lending of last resort facilities, they are among the most basic features of a well-functioning economy. The persistent failure to recognise and operationalise such labour-market public backstops thus constitutes one of the most consequential, if intangible, infrastructure failures of our time. To address the foundations of this blind spot, the article draws on critical infrastructure studies, which conceptualise infrastructural forms as lively, political, and contested. I argue that attention to infrastructural form foregrounds the individuated ontology structuring contemporary IPE. The article then draws a parallel between the historical hard-wiring of public backstops into financial markets and the contemporary hard-wiring of inequities into monetary infrastructure, sustained by epistemic assumptions about accounting, money, and price stability. The argument is developed through the case of public option employment.