Macro N Cheese

** 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_oCLzzEVquQ

If 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 reward
tool libraries and mutual credit
how “awakening” without community can curdle into conspiracism

For 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/DBAHO7wMQamXyN6eykgirQ

This 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_esV3lRK9-75A

What 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/nFGkw4EfRUCv9EHxqCFFqg
They 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 Hartman
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andrewghartman
Twitter/X: @HartmanAndrew
IG: https://www.instagram.com/professorandrewhartman/
BlueSky: @andrewhartman.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-hartman-45045610/