Macro N Cheese

We’ve made the case before, but it bears repeating: MMT is a politically neutral, descriptive lens explaining the operational realities of a sovereign fiat currency system where the availability of real resources, not money, are the constraint. And Marxism is an analytical framework for understanding class relations and production. The two are not inherently opposed. It’s a mistake to dismiss MMT as capitalist apologetics.
Steve’s guest is Dr. Anthony Anastasi, an economist teaching at the Sino-British College, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. They talk about Anthony’s paper: Marxism and MMT: How Modern Monetary Theory Can Enrich the Debate Amongst Marxists.
They dismantle the all-too-common Marxist critiques of MMT, which claim that the state can’t control money’s value, and that MMT lacks a theory of value. (However, the ubiquitous “taxpayer money” framing that feeds austerity myths, is not limited to Marxists.) The discussion reframes the state's monetary capacity as a tool for class struggle rather than a capitalist backstop.
They look at the federal job guarantee with reference to Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of non-reformist reform, ie, a reform that can weaken capitalist logic and build working-class consciousness and power.
Anthony also brings an on-the-ground perspective, sharing observations from China’s political economy, including local-vs-central financing, RMB-denominated debt, capital controls, and emerging debates that resemble MMT arguments even when not labeled as such.
Dr. Anthony William Donald Anastasi is an economist and lecturer specializing in development economics and international political economy. He teaches at the Sino-British College, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, and holds a Ph.D. from East China Normal University. His research examines how state–business relations, industrial policy, monetary sovereignty, and income distribution shape economic growth, trade patterns, and political power, with a particular focus on China and East Asia. Alongside publishing in SSCI-ranked journals, he regularly writes for the popular press on the Chinese and U.S. economies and global trade.
@_AWDA_ on X

Steve opens in a subdued mood brought on by the dizzying speed of ‘current events.’ For this episode he’s stepping back and looking at Venezuela. News reports are working hard to create confusion. On social media US citizens claim that kidnapping a sitting president is justified if you don’t like him. Or if he’s socialist.
To understand a situation, it must be considered historically, materially, and as a connected process. With that in mind, Ricardo Vaz of Venezuelanalysis, joins Steve to talk about what the Bolivarian Revolution actually was – on the ground – beyond the familiar US media caricatures. Ricardo walks through key turning points in the Chávez era and the social gains that reshaped everyday life. But there’s a bigger question that haunts every revolutionary project. How do you build new forms of democratic power while the old state machinery, domestic elites, and hostile external forces push back?
(Does this sound familiar? It will if you took part in RP Book Club’s study of State and Revolution)
From there, the conversation follows the oil thread. It’s not a single-cause explanation, but it’s where sovereignty, development, and imperial pressure collide. Steve and Ricardo unpack how the hydrocarbons industry evolved, what “nationalization” really meant in practice, and why the fight over Venezuela’s resources can’t be separated from US strategy in the hemisphere.
They then look into the Maduro years, sanctions, economic siege, and the constant tug-of-war inside Venezuela between survival policies and revolutionary horizons. This includes a clear-eyed look at opposition figures and the narratives that dominate US talking points. The episode closes with a grounded discussion of why Venezuela matters as a 21st-century political experiment, and what meaningful solidarity looks like when the headlines are designed to mislead and misdirect.
Ricardo Vaz grew up in Mozambique with strong political leanings and a clear anti-imperialist outlook, which led him early on to closely follow the Bolivarian Revolution and Chavismo in Venezuela. After living in various countries and continents, he moved to Venezuela in early 2019. Although trained in theoretical physics, he gradually shifted into journalism and political analysis, joining the Venezuela Analysis staff as a writer and editor in 2018. His main interests include sanctions, popular power organizations, and corporate media coverage of Venezuela. He is also a member of grassroots media collectives including Tatuy TV and Utopix.
venezuelanalysis.com
@venanalysis on X

Steve welcomes back Erald Kolasi, physicist-economist, author, and friend of the podcast. Erald is here to do a demolition job on “institutional” development fables like Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail. He argues that by treating good institutions as the master key (inclusive vs. extractive) they smuggle in a liberal moral scoreboard while dodging the real motors of history: power, class struggle, imperial systems, and material constraints like energy, trade dependence, war, and ecological shocks.
To “steelman” Acemoglu and Robinson’s position, Erald uses their favorite showcase case – North vs. South Korea. He lays out their comparison of the “tyrannical dictatorship” vs the “open” society and presents their explanation for these differences.
Erald then flips the script: the DPRK outperformed for decades, then crashed not because its “institutions got worse,” but because the USSR collapsed. Cheap, subsidized energy disappeared, wrecking agriculture and triggering famine.
The pattern repeats across history. Using examples like China and Venezuela, the episode explores how wars, sanctions, resource access, and global power structures shape economic outcomes far more than abstract institutional rules. Development is a struggle rooted in material conditions and geopolitical realities, not a neutral competition between better or worse policy designs.
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, www.eraldkolasi.com.
Subscribe to his Substack: https://substack.com/@technodynamics

Shealeigh Voitl and Andy Lee Roth join Steve to talk about Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2025. The book – an annual publication – compiles the year's most important yet underreported or misreported news stories, which they’ve identified through a student-led research process.
Andy highlights the point that corporate news focuses on what went wrong today but ignores what goes wrong every day. “It's the difference between dramatic events and systemic problems.”
The #1 underreported story is that of ICE soliciting private contractors to monitor social media for critics and assess their "proclivity to violence," a move toward normalized surveillance that received little corporate media attention.
Steve and his guests also discuss broader themes, linking media patterns to cultural hegemony and manufacturing consent, where state and oligarchic interests align to shape public perception. Examples include coverage of Israel-Palestine, university crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech, and the hiring of figures like Bari Weiss.
Andy Lee Roth is editor-at-large for Project Censored and its publishing imprint, The Censored Press. He is co-editor of Project’s State of the Free Press yearbook series, and a coauthor of The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People.
Shealeigh Voitl is Project Censored's associate director. She helped develop the State of the Free Press 2024 teaching guide, the Project’s Beyond Fact-Checking: A Teaching Guide to the Power of News Frames, and The Project Censored Show’s forthcoming segment Frame-Check.
Find their work at https://www.projectcensored.org/
@ProjectCensored on X

Let’s face it, even “good” macro talk can fall into the trap of treating the economy like a tidy spreadsheet while real lives get crushed in the margins. To help us peer beneath the covers, Steve invited Emma Holten, a Copenhagen-based political economist to talk about her book Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World. We often discuss deficits around here, but Emma is looking at a different kind. She reframes deficit as what societies rack up when they systematically undervalue care: the paid and unpaid labor (still disproportionately done by women) that keeps people healthy, capable, and alive.
Emma and Steve discuss the way mainstream economics has long treated the home, the body, and the mind as a black box, as if workers spring fully formed from the soil and arrive at the labor market already fed, healed, soothed, socialized, and ready to produce.
They talk about measurement and the way the GDP counts a $3,000 ambulance bill as added value instead of predatory extraction. They also look at power and social cohesion. Steve connects Emma’s thesis to MMT’s real-resources focus and the Job Guarantee as a way to fund socially necessary work that markets underprovide, while also admitting the hard question: even if policy is sound, capital and its political machinery never volunteer to be disarmed.
Emma Holten is a feminist activist and gender policy consultant. Since 2018, she has worked with feminist economics. In 2024 she published her first book “DEFICIT - On the value of care” in Danish. It is available in English, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, and Italian - and forthcoming in 6 other languages. It has won the Politiken Literature Prize, The Library Reader’s Prize, The Sara Danius Prize, The Sprout Prize and was shortlisted for the Montana Literature Award.