**Don't forget Macro 'n Chill, the Zoom gathering where we'll discuss this episode of the podcast and build our community. Tuesday, October 20th at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Use this link to register Steve is joined by EJ, host of the NonCompete YouTube channel, editor-in-chief at Banyan House Publishing and producer for Luna Oi [Nguyen]. EJ is an American expat in Vietnam, and this conversation grows out of his article, Why Won't They Just Say Capitalism? The Progressive Fixation on Oligarchy is a Diversion from Class Struggle. Steve admits he uses the word "oligarchy" himself, as a carrot to pull people into conversation. But is oligarchy a handy on-ramp or a diversion? "Fight oligarchy" and "No Kings" get people fired up, but they don't really collide with capital. It's bad man vs good man politics. It's band-aids on heart attacks.EJ starts with method. Historical materialism defines things by their relationships, so the political and the economic are one system. It's dialectically intertwined. The oligarchy is the capitalist class and its agents in the state; and the state is there to enforce class relations. Who owns the means of production? That's the property question, and the ruling class wants workers to stop asking it.Then they take on a familiar objection: words like capitalism and socialism scare people off. EJ points to Graham Platner and to Bernie Sanders, who rarely says capitalism without an adjective stuck on the front. But they'll call us communists no matter what language we pick. After years in marketing, he'll tell you people can smell deception a mile away. And the truth is on our side.From there it's reformism. EJ walks through Lenin's Marxism and Reformism, Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program and the long fight against economism. Reforms won under capitalism get snatched back if they don't feed a class-conscious movement. Steve brings the MMT lens. A currency-issuing government faces no financial barrier to universal healthcare, free college or a Green New Deal. So why are workers begging for concessions? This all tells you who the state serves.The last stretch is about what to build. EJ turns to the Vietnamese revolution and its red unions, including the 1945 uprising in Hanoi and the role of power plant workers. He looks at the strengths and failures of the IWW and at how US unions got captured, and he's blunt in stating nobody can hand us a finished plan. We learn strategy through practice and mistakes. He and Steve get into the balance between tailism and commandism, and Lenin's highway bandit analogy. When is compromise about survival and when is it selling out.The takeaway: naming the system is the first step toward organizing against it. Theory and practice must be connected. EJ is the host of the NonCompete YouTube channel, editor-in-chief at Banyan House Publishing, and producer for Luna Oi. A former marketing professional, he writes on dialectical and historical materialism from Vietnam. Find his work on his Substack, substack.com/@noncompetemedia and the NonCompete YouTube channel, youtube.com/@NonCompete

** Come to Macro 'n Chill next Tuesday. We'll be discussing this, the 400th episode of our podcast! October 13th at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/MKAXG1OQTIq2ly3Pu7B2sQThis is our 19th episode featuring Fadhel Kaboub, so who better to bring back for our 400th? He joins Steve to explore whether the countries of the Global South can industrialize on their own terms now that the old order of debt conditionality, export dependence, and fragmented production is breaking apart? Fadhel walks us through the report, One Voice, One Strategy: A Continental Blueprint for African Strategic Minerals, Joint Industrial Policies, and Diplomacy, published by Southern Africa Resource Watch.Fadhel begins with the moment itself, a structural rupture in the global economic order that opens a short window for the Global South to reposition. He explains why the usual development model of borrowing, exporting and courting foreign investment keeps countries at the bottom of global value chains, and why scale matters. From there he sketches a different way to finance transformation, built on cooperation across borders instead of debt. He also takes on the idea that working together costs a nation its sovereignty, tracing it to the neocolonial politics that followed independence and the fate of Kwame Nkrumah's vision of a united Africa. Along the way, MMT's understanding of currency-issuing governments is used to challenge the myth that Africa is simply short of money.Steve presses on the hard questions. How does a bloc avoid building a new hierarchy of its own? Fadhel says ownership, profit and wage shares, labor protections, land rights, and environmental safeguards must be pre-negotiated, with trade unions and frontline communities at the table from day one. Majority ownership stays with governments, and profits flow into a joint sovereign wealth fund that evens out inequities between members. Along the way he traces how the African Union's emphasis on national sovereignty undercut Nkrumah's vision of a united Africa.Then comes the question of blowback, from sanctions and false narratives to assassinations and invasions. Fadhel answers with broad public ownership of the vision, guaranteed food, fuel, and medical supply lines for vulnerable members, and a collective security pact with a BRICS bloc that includes China, a counterweight to NATO that does not exist today.This is a conversation about what solidarity looks like at the scale of a continent, and why a plan has to be designed around working people from the start. It is a positive vision for an exhausted generation.Fadhel Kaboub is an associate professor of economics at Denison University, president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and author of Global South Perspectives on Substack. He serves on the United Nations High-Level Advisory Board of Economic and Social Affairs and is an expert on designing public policies to enhance monetary and economic sovereignty in the Global South.Find Fadhel's work on Substack at Global South Perspectives, which is free and open, and on LinkedIn.

** Come to Macro ‘n Chill, our community-building online gathering & discussion group. Tuesday, October 6, at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/6VRb9hKDRB2_oCLzzEVquQIf we reject electoral politics as a path to fundamental change, the inevitable question becomes: “So what’s the plan?” In this episode, Steve, a Leninist, is joined by Pieter de Beer, an anarchist, community organizer, and author of the Anarcasper Substack, to talk about dual power and building parallel, horizontal systems to aid working people in taking action.Despite approaching the question from different traditions, Steve and Pieter find considerable common ground in the need for dual power, mutual aid, community resilience, and collective self-provisioning.Pieter argues that cooperatives, tenant unions, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, and other alternatives already exist. The problem is that they remain isolated islands. The task is to connect them, coordinating resources and building the trust that an atomized capitalist society systematically erodes. Rather than waiting for political institutions to deliver change, communities can begin constructing networks capable of providing food, housing, healthcare, tools, and other necessities, strengthening their ability to struggle.Steve and Pieter also discuss:why strikes collapse when workers have no material backstop"permeable selfhood" and participation as its own rewardtool libraries and mutual credithow “awakening” without community can curdle into conspiracismFor Pieter, the starting point is clear: show up, help people, build trust, connect organizations, and turn isolated acts of solidarity into durable social power.Pieter de Beer, known online as Anarcasper, is a community organizer in the Middle East. He is currently part of several mutual aid and direct-action anarchist affinity groups, and has been doing mutual aid for 28 years, across a multitude of countries. Find Pieter at https://substack.com/@anarcasper

**On Tuesday, we’ll be discussing this episode of the podcast. You are invited to the online gathering, September 29, at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/DBAHO7wMQamXyN6eykgirQThis episode is a rebroadcast of Steve’s recent appearance on the Jaybefaunt Show, with James Fauntleroy, where he was asked to take apart the familiar panic over the national debt. Starting with the claim that the US has crossed $40 trillion in debt, Steve explains why a currency-issuing government is nothing like a household. The so-called national debt is essentially the record of dollars the federal government has spent into the economy and not subsequently taxed away, with Treasury securities providing interest-bearing assets to their holders. The federal government cannot run out of its own currency, so the size of the debt does not tell us whether the government can “afford” Social Security, healthcare, housing, education, or other public priorities. The meaningful constraints are the economy’s real productive resources and the political decisions governing their use. The important question, then, isn’t how much the government spends, but what it spends on, for whom, and to what end.From there, the conversation moves beyond MMT’s monetary mechanics to the political economy that determines how those monetary capacities are used. James and Steve examine class power, imperialism, the limits of electoral politics, and the role of capitalist institutions in protecting private accumulation. The national debt, they argue, becomes less an economic constraint than an ideological weapon, obscuring the enormous productive and financial capacity of the state while narrowing what working people are encouraged to imagine possible. The discussion ultimately asks what follows once we understand both the possibilities revealed by MMT and the constraints imposed by capitalism: education, organization, mutual aid, dual power, and building working-class capacity beyond the ballot box.James Fauntleroy is a political and social commentator aimed at making the world better through his content. “Whether it's talking about foreign or domestic policy, social issues, or just being quirky and funny; the aim is to leave the world better than (he) found it.”Find all his work at linktr.ee/jaybefaunt

Join us on Tuesday. Together we’ll listen to and discuss this episode in our virtual community gathering. Sept 22 at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/RuYdM1rUS_esV3lRK9-75AWhat do government deficits have to do with the money in our pockets? Returning guest Jim Byrne, of the MMT101.ORG podcast, joins Steve to demystify one of Modern Monetary Theory’s most important tools: sectoral balances. They unpack the accounting identity that let a handful of economists see the 2008 financial crash coming years before Wall Street or the Fed had a clue. Using simple, everyday analogies, Jim walks through why government deficits and surpluses are mirror images of what's happening in your own bank account — and why the conventional wisdom about government "living within its means" gets the whole picture backwards.Along the way, Steve and Jim dig into the real history: how nearly every attempt to pay down the national debt has been followed by a depression or recession, how a toxic mix of government surpluses, ballooning private debt, and banking deregulation set the stage for 2008, and how the subprime mortgage scheme was less an accident than a business model.The discussion turns to Jim’s native Scotland and the fiscal framework proposed for a future independent country. The Scottish Government plans initially to continue using the British pound, making Scotland a currency user rather than issuer, while also proposing fiscal rules aligned with the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact as it pursues EU membership. The EU framework retains reference values of a government deficit below 3 percent of GDP and public debt below 60 percent. Jim uses sectoral balances to show how imposing such limits, particularly in a country running an external deficit, would squeeze the domestic private sector, increasing household indebtedness and putting pressure on employment and public services.Accounting identities can tell us how much money is flowing between sectors, but that’s not the whole picture. Steve and Jim add the missing dimension of class and distribution. Sectoral balances give us the map; stratification and class analysis tell us where the money actually lands. Together, they provide a powerful way to cut through familiar myths about government debt and expose the political choices hidden behind supposedly neutral economic policy.Jim Byrne hosts the MMT101.ORG podcast, where he focuses on explaining Modern Monetary Theory, heterodox economics, and how public monetary systems really operate.Follow his work and the MMT101.ORG podcast at mmt101.substack.com@MMT101dotORG on X

This week we’re having a long-overdue reunion with John T. Harvey, known to our listeners as the Cowboy Economist because of his plainspoken, accessible way of explaining complex ideas. John talks with Steve about his latest book, US Business Cycles 1954–2020. The conversation challenges mainstream economic theory that treats markets as naturally self-correcting, when in fact unemployment, inequality, oligarchy, and recurring crises are outcomes generated by the system itself.The discussion brings MMT’s insights about money and real resources into direct contact with the question of class power. If the federal government can finance full employment, and a Job Guarantee could give workers a genuine alternative to precarious private employment, why don’t we do it? John and Steve agree on the central contradiction: the obstacles are not primarily economic or technical. They lie in the distribution of power and in institutions structured around the interests of capital. The challenge, then, is not simply figuring out what is economically possible, but understanding what prevents us from doing it.John T. Harvey is the Hal Wright Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Texas Christian University. He is a well-known heterodox scholar who has published extensively, including two books: Currencies, Crises and Capital Flows (2009) and Contending Perspectives in Economics (2020 2nd edition). His most recent book is US Business Cycles 1954–2020, published by Cambridge University Press (December 2025). He has earned numerous awards for teaching and research and his work focuses on exchange rates and business cycles.

** Look forward to an exciting 'Chill' this week! Join our online gathering to discuss this podcast & build community. Tuesday, September 8th at 8pm ET/5 pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/nFGkw4EfRUCv9EHxqCFFqgThey say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. Capitalism pulled off something even trickier: convincing us it’s just the way things work.Historian Andrew Hartman joins Steve to examine how American public education became a battleground in the struggle over class, ideology, and political consciousness. Drawing on his book Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School, Andrew traces how the radical possibilities of the 1930s, including militant teacher organizing and encouraging students to question capitalist individualism, were systematically narrowed by the Red Scare. Schools increasingly shifted toward preparing students to adapt to the existing order.Steve and Andrew explore the crucial role of liberal anti-communism, the Cold War equating of capitalism with democracy and freedom, and an educational culture that treats capitalism as ordinary reality while Marxism and socialism must continually justify their existence. The result is a powerful look at cultural hegemony: how the boundaries of what Americans consider reasonable, possible, or even thinkable were constructed, and why so much of that Cold War ideological architecture remains with us today.Andrew Hartman is a distinguished professor of history at Illinois State University and the author of several books, including Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School; A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars; and Karl Marx in America, out in 2025 with the University of Chicago Press. His website: Andrew HartmanFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/andrewghartmanTwitter/X: @HartmanAndrewIG: https://www.instagram.com/professorandrewhartman/BlueSky: @andrewhartman.bsky.socialLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-hartman-45045610/

Erald Kolasi returns to the podcast to remind us that AI doesn’t simply exist weightlessly in the ephemeral cloud. Drawing on his research into its global energy and emissions impact, Erald traces AI’s vast material infrastructure, from mining, semiconductors, water, energy, and logistics to data centers and power generation. His life-cycle analysis reveals a monster-sized ecological footprint, in contrast to conventional estimates that focus narrowly on electricity consumed at data centers.But this goes deeper than technology. Steve and Erald examine AI through the dynamics of capital accumulation, monopoly power, financial speculation, imperialism, and the intimate relationship between corporations and the capitalist state. Its explosive growth reflects decisions about who controls society’s resources and what they are used for. The conversation closes by imagining a radically different trajectory: publicly controlled technology directed toward reducing necessary labor and meeting human needs rather than enriching private capital and accelerating ecological destruction. What kind of political economic system would this require?AI is the subject, but capitalism is the story.Erald Kolasi is a writer and researcher focusing on the nexus between energy, technology, economics, complex systems, and ecological dynamics. His book, The Physics of Capitalism, came out from Monthly Review Press in February 2025. He received his PhD in Physics from George Mason University in 2016. You can find out more about Erald and his work at his website, eraldkolasi.com. Subscribe to his Substack: https://substack.com/@technodynamics

**Join us on Tuesday to discuss this episode in our online gathering, Macro 'n Chill. August 25, 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/NGxWl6qMTaKXPhR51uHkwAIf public power repeatedly stands behind private finance when it fails, shouldn't that same power be directed toward employment, productive capacity, and human need? So why isn't it?Economist Eric Tymoigne returns to the podcast to examine the rapid growth of private credit and private equity through Hyman Minsky’s theory of money manager capitalism. Eric argues that the expansion of payment-in-kind interest, securitization, layered leverage, and dependence on rising asset prices are signs that Ponzi finance is becoming increasingly embedded in private markets, making the financial system more fragile. He warns that efforts to “democratize” these markets by opening them to ordinary savers will broaden the pool of investors available to absorb risks and losses (which should really be borne by the wealthy.)The conversation then moves from financial instability to political economy. Through an MMT lens, Eric explains the enormous potential capacity of a currency-issuing government to contain financial crises, sustain incomes, and direct investment toward public purposes. Again we must ask why it doesn't happen. This raises the deeper question of whose purposes the state serves. Steve and Eric discuss public investment, community banking, the federal job guarantee, the influence of wealth on political decision-making, and the limits of electoral democracy in a capitalist system. Eric Tymoigne is an Associate Professor of Economics at Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon; and Research Associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His areas of teaching and research include macroeconomics, money and banking, and monetary economics.Find him on Twitter @tymoignee

Daniel Tutt and returning guest C. Derick Varn join Steve to discuss their new book, The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism, whose title states its thesis outright. When the left speaks of a unified people confronting a corrupt elite, it conceals the real stratifications inside the working class and borrows a Manichean framework that functions identically on the right. Their argument: since 2008, from Occupy through Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn, and Sanders, left populism has served to extinguish the class antagonism at the center of socialism, operating as a new Popular Front in which liberalism holds the upper hand.The conversation lands directly on this show's own history. Varn is blunt about his long-running argument with MMT advocates: he never disputed the nature of the currency, he disputed the analysis of power. They are not going to let you have a Job Guarantee, because it removes their ability to discipline workers. Steve agrees, describing his own path out of economism and the trap of thinking a basket of policies and a few more progressives in office adds up to a threat to capital.On class consciousness, Varn is careful with a term he calls one of the most abused in socialist history. The reason to organize around the working class is not its victimhood. It is that the working class already possesses, collectively, the skills to reproduce society. The differences within the working class are resolvable. The difference between the working class and those who live off its labor is not.They close on electoralism. Varn's formulation: electoralism is a tactic, not a principle. Democracy is the principle. Tutt points to Lenin's actual position, that ballots are justified only alongside extra-parliamentary means and on terms of strict class independence. The Popular Front let liberalism lead. The United Front did not.If you've followed this show from Ep 218 - Beware! the Counter-Revolution with C. Derick Varn, through Ep 318 - The Death of the Left? with Simon Winlow & Steve Hall, Ep 371 - You Can't Vote Away Colonialism with Fadhel Kaboub, and Ep 388 - From Theory to Praxis: Lenin's Revolutionary Formula with Breht O'Shea, this episode is the strategic argument those conversations kept circling. Daniel Tutt is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family and How to Read Like a Parasite. His writing has been featured in Jacobin, Current Affairs, Philosophy Now and Aeon Magazine. He is the host of the Emancipations podcast and study group collective. Find him on Twitter @TuttReal or his Substack: https://danieltutt.substack.com/aboutC. Derick Varn is an author, poet, and educator, and host of the podcast Varn Vlog, where he publishes podcasts and series on the great thinkers, and interviews authors and academics. He is the author of Apocalyptics and Liberation and All That Bright Etc. He has been a union rep for the past six years. Find him on Twitter @TheRealVarnVlog or his podcast https://varnvlog.buzzsprout.com/