Macro N Cheese

Steven D Grumbine

A podcast that critically examines the working-class struggle through the lens of MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Host Steve Grumbine, founder of Real Progressives, provides incisive political commentary and showcases grassroots activism. Join us for a robust, unfiltered exploration of economic issues that impact the working class, as we challenge the status quo and prioritize collective well-being over profit. This is comfort food for the mind, fueling our fight for justice and equity!

  1. 3d ago

    Ep 404 - China Is Not Your Activist: The Contradictions of Socialist Statecraft with Amy Yang

    ** Discuss this episode with us in Macro ‘n Chill, an online gathering for the community. Tuesday, November 10, 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Click here to register Why do so many of us expect China to behave like an activist, cutting ties with Israel or denouncing the West at the top of its lungs? Steve takes up that tension with Amy Yang who argues the demand is moral rather than materialist, and asks what changes when we look at China as a state with its own history, contradictions and material limits. Amy is a Chinese student and writer based in Sweden. Her Substack articles focus on actually existing socialist countries and anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World, and she challenges Eurocentric Western Marxist narratives. She co-hosts the podcasts Resistance is for Tao and For the Masses. Amy admits she once shared the frustration, being an activist herself, until conversations with comrades and family pushed her to read the history. She traces Mao’s turn from the hard anti-imperialist rhetoric of the 1960s to trade and technology transfer in the 1970s, a response to neoliberal finance subjugating the Third World through debt and the IMF. China holds one fifth of humanity and is still a Third World country by per capita measures, so it needs peace and a multipolar order to build the productive forces that a later stage of socialism requires. Steve adds the lessons China drew from the Soviet Union, and Amy reads the Long March as a long retreat toward the goal. Steve and Amy then take on Western Marxists and Trotskyists who aim their fire at actually existing socialism instead of their own empires. Amy separates tactical compromise from principle with the image of bamboo, which bends without breaking. Private firms can make toys and phones, but land, banks, energy, water, telecommunications and public services stay under state control, and non-interference anchors foreign policy. Steve brings in Fadhel Kaboub’s emphasis on productive, technological and energy sovereignty and asks about ownership and class power. Amy describes the shift since 2012 toward state and collective enterprise, and argues that Chinese workers still produce value for richer Western workers. Their class struggle therefore runs on two fronts, one at home against capital and one globally against imperial value transfer. They also discuss how China prepares for confrontation while playing a long game. The last stretch turns to the imperial core. Amy argues that voting and symbolic protest will not do the work, and that every disruption of the ruling class, like the revolt in France, gives Third World nations room to breathe. She points to the Black Panther Party’s parallel institutions, to speaking with workers in their own language, and to accepting sacrifice. Steve warns against both adventurism and tailism and recalls Luxemburg on the elected socialist becoming a minister of capital rather than vice versa. Amy Yang is a Chinese student temporarily based in Europe, whose articles mainly focus on actually existing socialist countries and anti-imperialist struggles in the third world. She seeks to challenge Western Marxist narratives and contribute a Chinese Marxist and anti-imperialist perspective to debates on global politics. Find Amy on Substack and Instagram under her name, and find her podcasts Resistance is for Tao and For the Masses on Substack.

    Ep 404 - China Is Not Your Activist: The Contradictions of Socialist Statecraft with Amy Yang

  2. Oct 31

    Ep 403 - Are You in the Loop? with Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson

    ** Come to Tuesday’s Macro ‘n Chill where we’ll work through the tough questions together. November 3rd at 8pm ET / 5pm PT Use this link to register Can a city or state build its own financial plumbing to blunt federal austerity, without waiting on a movement big enough to capture the state? Steve has long been skeptical of electoral routes to power, but he is curious enough about a new public banking design to give it a full hearing, and to ask what it could do if it worked. Steve is joined by Scott Ferguson and Tyler Suksawat of the Money on the Left collective, an MMT-oriented group that develops democratic public finance projects. Scott is a longtime friend and returning guest. Tyler, based in Seattle, designed the Loop, which grew out of the federal funding cuts and the Fed’s pandemic-era municipal liquidity facility. A state or city creates a public bank and designates it the sole buyer of its own municipal bonds. The bank extends credit to buy them, the interest flows back to the bank, and the profits are netted into the general fund. Interest that would have gone to Wall Street stays in the public purse. Because taxes, fines and fees are deposited in the bank, it can expand credit using ordinary bank accounting, with no special exemptions. Steve brings up Warren Mosler’s line that we already have public banks, and his own sour experience with public banking advocates who confuse public and private debt. Tyler and Scott draw the contrast. The usual pitch is a friendlier private bank that must prove profitability through revolving loan funds. The Loop treats public banking as fiscal design, a way to expand the public fisc, with a strong balance sheet and little risk of a run. Then comes the hard question of power. Officials want to see a movement before they commit, and movements want officials to go first. Scott argues the Loop is a lever against what Jakob Feinig calls monetary silencing, and a fight over what is thinkable. Tyler describes organizing in Seattle, from the mayor’s office and city council staff to a state senator, and the limits of a politics that celebrates the millionaire’s tax and then has to keep millionaires comfortable. The conversation widens to what could travel beyond Seattle. Finance capital is the final boss and will fight back. But every government resents its interest payments, and even a right-wing sovereign banking camp is out there. The Bank of North Dakota’s ties to community banks and credit unions point toward unlikely coalitions that break the zero-sum, rob Peter to pay Paul script. The takeaway: even a modest local institution can expose the myth of scarcity and give working communities a base of stability, whichever way the political winds blow. Find Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson and Money on the Left at https://moneyontheleft.org, including their new podcast on democratic public finance, In the Loop.

    Ep 403 - Are You in the Loop? with Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson

  3. Oct 24

    Ep 402 - A Feeding Frenzy at the End of the World with Brett Scott

    ** Mark your calendar for Tuesday, October 27. Macro 'n Chill begins at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Join our community-building gathering by registering here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/S8jsoNLnQhaPukiAFkYc2w Are the tech oligarchs a new kind of power, or just another face of an old one? Well, if you think big oil or big finance represent the greatest threat to civilization, think again. Steve invites friend of the pod Brett Scott, writer, campaigner and self-described neo-Luddite, to unravel the jockeying among the capitalist class. Steve begins by mentioning The Nerd Reich, a book by Gil Durant, which argues that Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are pushing to replace bourgeois democratic government with corporate authoritarianism. The book itself isn't the point of this discussion; it's a springboard into what technology becomes under concentrated ownership, and whether the mask has finally slipped. Brett is the author of Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. He sees the tech owners as the latest faction of the capitalist class to seize a political organ. It's old news to say that the state under capitalism serves the interests of property against unions and socialist movements. What is new is the open display of power by tech oligarchs. Trump barely hides his service to the data center builders. Listeners to this podcast already know how we feel about the "great man" version of history. Ditto the "bad man". If you remove one bad man, another is waiting. Brett argues that Thiel, Musk and even Epstein are products and mediums of the system, more puppeted than puppeteering, like a weather system moving through billions of people. Brett also reads the elite fixation on Mars, immortality and network states as escape fantasies, a feeding frenzy at the end of the world. (It's as if they're worried about an apocalypse while they're in the process of creating it.) The engine, Brett says, is chronic insecurity. Workers, firms and countries are all told they will be left behind in the AI race, and he breaks down the racing metaphor into leaders, followers and laggards. He adds that progress resets to zero, because every new gadget becomes a baseline requirement for survival. Technology makes our lives faster, not easier. Many of us – families, workers, students – continually face debt and obsolescence. Brett addresses security as a political question. At the international level, he ties anti-communist roll-back, from Southern Africa to Chile, to the effort to reintroduce insecurity. The takeaway? Technology will never save us while an elite few own the assets. Brett Scott is a writer, campaigner and self-described neo-Luddite, author of Cloudmoney and a longtime advocate for protecting cash. Find his work on the ASOMO (Altered States of Monetary Consciousness) on Substack and his YouTube channel on monetary history and technology. Substack: https://www.asomo.co/ YouTube: youtube.com/@BrettScott X: @Suitpossum

    Ep 402 - A Feeding Frenzy at the End of the World with Brett Scott

  4. Oct 17

    Ep 401 - Why Won't They Say Capitalism? with EJ of NonCompete

    **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

    Ep 401 - Why Won't They Say Capitalism? with EJ of NonCompete

  5. Oct 10

    Ep 400 - The Power of a United Africa with Fadhel Kaboub

    ** 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.

    Ep 400 - The Power of a United Africa with Fadhel Kaboub

  6. Oct 3

    Ep 399 - Resistance and Resilience with Pieter de Beer

    ** 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 rewardtool libraries and mutual credithow “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

    Ep 399 - Resistance and Resilience with Pieter de Beer

  7. Sep 26

    Ep 398 - The National Debt and the $40 Trillion Nothingburger with James Fauntleroy

    **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

    Ep 398 - The National Debt and the $40 Trillion Nothingburger with James Fauntleroy

  8. Sep 19

    Ep 397 - Sectoral Balances: Predicting the Next Crises with Jim Byrne

    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

    Ep 397 - Sectoral Balances: Predicting the Next Crises with Jim Byrne
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About

A podcast that critically examines the working-class struggle through the lens of MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Host Steve Grumbine, founder of Real Progressives, provides incisive political commentary and showcases grassroots activism. Join us for a robust, unfiltered exploration of economic issues that impact the working class, as we challenge the status quo and prioritize collective well-being over profit. This is comfort food for the mind, fueling our fight for justice and equity!

Information

  • Creator
    Steven D Grumbine
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    300
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Real Progressives, Inc.
  • Show Website
    Macro N Cheese

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