Macro N Cheese

** Do you want to talk about this episode with us? Come to Macro ‘n Chill, our online gathering. Tuesday, August 4, 8pm ET/5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/nLks4k8gQWKQzTAn0CEsoA

Ashwin Shantha joins Steve for a discussion challenging Western narratives on China – particularly the all-too-common opinions that dismiss its socialist character. This episode makes the case that China is a genuine socialist project where the state disciplines capital rather than being governed by it.
Ashwin illustrates how China's green industrial revolution—driven by rapid progress in electric vehicles and renewable energy—marks a qualitative break from capitalist development paths. Unlike the Global North's extractive model, China's centrally planned approach prioritizes use-value objectives (clean air, energy self-reliance, and technological independence) over exchange-value maximization. The state constructs markets strategically, using mechanisms like the dual-credit policy to force both domestic and foreign automakers toward sustainable production targets.
While the episode isn’t focused on MMT, it highlights how China's monetary sovereignty enables fiscal space for long-term industrial planning. The nation's ability to issue its own currency and direct credit toward clean development highlights a crucial distinction from Global South countries trapped in IMF-imposed structural adjustment programs. This self-determined policy space, which is denied to nations like India and much of Africa, allows Beijing to absorb neoliberal shocks while maintaining state control over the economy.
China's sustainable growth model is anti-imperialist in two key ways. First, energy independence reduces reliance on imported fossil fuels that expose the country to geopolitical leverage through choke points like the Malacca Strait. Second, technological autonomy focuses on developing indigenous productive forces that break the Western monopoly over clean technology.
By keeping private capital subordinate to state priorities, China shows that socialist modernization offers a workable alternative for the Global South, avoiding the de-development and resource plunder that characterizes Western industrialization.
China's model may still have some contradictions, but it continues to show what is possible when state power is wielded in the interests of the working class.
Ashwin Shantha (they/them) is a doctoral student whose research focuses broadly on the political economy of sovereign development in the global South, focusing specifically on China and South Asia. Some of their existing work has researched South-South development cooperation between China and Pakistan through the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as, more recently, China's state-led green industrial revolution in the electric vehicles and renewable energy sectors. Ashwin is also the host of the International Solidarity Podcast, which focuses on the politics of anti-imperialism and socialism in the global South.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@journalofintlsolidarity
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/journalofintlsolidarity
Substack: https://intlsolidarity.substack.com/

This week we’re releasing an episode from Scotland‘s Political Economy podcast. Host William Thomson invited Steve to join him to compare and reflect on their favorite interviews and the thinkers who most shaped their worldviews – from Clara Mattei and Fadhel Kaboub to Bill Mitchell, Jason Hickel, and Marxist-Leninist thinkers. They explore the limits of MMT without class analysis, the capture of academic and political institutions by oligarchic interests, and the importance of historical materialism, Gramsci, and Lenin in understanding how power truly operates.
The episode looks at the evolution of the two independent podcasters, their intellectual awakenings, and their shared conviction that the fight is not for better policy within capitalism, but for a fundamental transformation of the system itself. And for listeners to Macro N Cheese, it provides insight into Steve’ seven-year journey, taking the podcast from a strict MMT focus to a broader political economic analysis rooted in class struggle, revolutionary theory, and a critical view of electoral politics.

William Thomson is a political economist focused on the political economy of Scotland. His work considers how the economy actually operates, how decisions are made, and how power, institutions, and policy shape outcomes across Scotland.
Support his work at patreon.com/Scotlandspoliticaleconomy
@Williamgallus on X

**Classic episode re-release! Originally published Sept, 21, 2019**
Legal scholar Rohan Grey knows how to use analogies to give shape to an idea. He illustrates his points with references to popular films, folklore and lyrical poets. With experience in the realms of music, early childhood education, political economy, and jurisprudence, he brings Modern Monetary Theory to life in unexpected ways. Throughout this conversation with Steve, he connects economics and the law by illustrating subtle conceptual parallels.
The episode begins where any discussion of macroeconomics should begin — talking about money. Instead of thinking of it as a “thing,” or a store of value, Rohan asks us to think of money as a series of relationships, structured by law. He calls it a web of invisible filaments. The MMT story starts with state-created money. While the original logic had to do with tax obligations, the desire for money takes on a life of its own. We don’t wake up thinking about wanting money to pay taxes. We want it for all those other goods and services we need and desire.
Steve asks Rohan to discuss talk about the Federal Reserve, an institution often misunderstood by even the sharpest political minds. The rest of this episode takes us through its history and before, beginning with the earliest years of the American colonies, when states were developing their own economies. This was a time when local governments were still relatively accountable to their constituents and the democratic process was vibrant. The constitution was designed in large part to move monetary powers from the state level up to the federal level. In fact, Rohan says that, in contrast to the American revolution, the creation of the US Constitution was a counter-revolution.
There’s far too much history to recount here. Rohan takes us through Lincoln’s creation of greenback dollars, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, FDR, and the decades-long bitter political battle for supremacy between the Department of Treasury and the Fed culminating in the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951.
The struggle to create a central bank was basically a power grab by the capitalist class. Throughout its history, the Fed has zealously guarded its autonomy just as the Supreme Court has done; each determined to remain unaccountable to democratic forces. Both institutions employ the same tactic, convincing the public that they alone have the unique expertise to deal with complex matters. Ultimately Rohan maintains that the Federal Reserve adds no real value to the government or the economy. Our listeners will surely agree.

Rohan Grey is an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law, where he teaches contracts, business associations, financial institutions, and a seminar on law, money and technology.
Find his work and an expanded bio at rohangrey.net
@rohangrey on Twitter

**We’re listening to and discussing this episode on Tuesday, July 14 at 8pm ET/5pm PT, in our online gathering Macro ‘n Chill. We’ve invited Breht to join us, so bring your questions. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/PXkazv5WTWW7b7kMExA8uw

"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." Steve's guest, Breht O’Shea of Rev Left Radio and Red Menace podcast, believes that dedicating one's life to fighting for this vision, even without knowing the outcome, is more meaningful than pursuing capital's vision of wealth and status.
Steve invited Breht to help tackle one of the most misunderstood and weaponized texts in Marxist theory: Vladimir Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, a book sometimes misused as a cudgel to pressure leftists into voting for the Democratic Party.
To set the record straight, Breht places the 1920 pamphlet in its proper historical context. It was written after the successful Bolshevik Revolution to advise European socialist movements on how to avoid fatal mistakes.
Together, Breht and Steve break down Lenin's dual critique: the ultra-left "infantile" error of purity-spiraled sectarianism, and the right-wing "opportunist" error of liquidating the revolutionary movement into bourgeois liberal politics. Lenin's strategic genius lies in maintaining firm revolutionary principles while remaining tactically flexible.
The discussion extends beyond the text to cover the necessity of organization and discipline (democratic centralism), the constant threat of counter-revolution, the failure of social democracy, and how fascism functions as capitalism's immune response to left-wing threats.

Breht O’Shea is the host of Rev Left Radio, the co-host of the Red Menace podcast, and author of the upcoming book “Letters to a Young Revolutionary” published by Iskra Books. Breht is also a longtime organizer in Omaha, Nebraska, a union electrician, and married father of three.

**Tuesday evening, at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT, we’ll be listening to this episode and discussing it during our online gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. Bring your thoughts, your insights, your questions. July 7th at at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ay2YXuCvRLOp1dV5yh8HKw

Women in politics, media, and public life are often placed at the center of the spectacle while being silenced on the issues that matter.
Media scholar Allison Butler talks to Steve about her book, Judgment of Gender, exposing how patriarchal power and capitalist media institutions weaponize pop culture and construct narratives that fixate on appearance, personality, and scandal while obscuring questions of class and power. The conversation reveals a core dialectical contradiction: women are centered in media only to be silenced. Their personhood is reduced to superficial tropes.
The critiques of political candidates Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and even Nikki Haley, focus on pantsuits, headbands, voice, and age instead of their actual policies, their service to capital, and their imperialist actions (hello? Clinton's role in Libya? “We came, we saw, he died.”) The media's obsession with superficiality silences substantive class-based critique.
Allison’s highlights the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. This is critical. It is not a fringe issue but a stark example of state-sanctioned violence and the super-exploitation of the most oppressed. That the legacy media's silence on this horror renders these lives invisible is a feature, not a bug, of a system that treats Indigenous lives as disposable

Allison Butler is a Senior Lecturer, Associate Chair, and the Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. She serves as Vice President on the board of the Media Freedom Foundation. She is the author of numerous articles and books on media literacy, and she is a co-author of multiple practical resources for media literacy education.
IG: @atbutler5
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-butler-190882108/
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