Macro N Cheese

**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/MKAXG1OQTIq2ly3Pu7B2sQ

This 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_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