Macro N Cheese

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A decade after the Sanders "insurgency" began, why has the electoral left never taught the public how money works? Steve takes up that question with Briahna Joy Gray, host of the Bad Faith podcast. In case you've been living under a rock, Briahna is a former attorney and Intercept senior politics editor who served as national press secretary for Bernie's 2020 campaign.
The two podcast hosts trade stories of how the 2016 campaign radicalized them, Steve from the MMT world and Briahna from the racial cudgel used against Bernie. She then asks why Bernie, with nothing left to lose, still won't explain Modern Monetary Theory. Steve admits he once believed Bernie was playing a long game, and recalls MMT economists who were plugged into progressive candidates... who still wouldn't touch it.
The middle of the conversation is a working session in framing. Steve lays out the MMT basics: money is a public monopoly, a creature of law. The government spends it into existence and taxes it out. Inflation, he explains isn't "too much money"; it's about monopoly pricing power. He points to Isabella Weber on sellers' inflation and the pandemic profit surges. Briahna pushes him (relentlessly!) for something a candidate could say on 60 Minutes. They land on this: we pay for Medicare for All the way we pay for the bombs, and when prices rise it is because corporations raise them. That shifts the blame from working people and relief checks to abusive use of corporate power. Steve brings in Clara Mattei's work on austerity as a tool to save capitalism.
The talk turns to electoralism itself – not surprising given their Bernie connection. Both argue that Democrats, including self-described socialists, are folded into a corporate, Zionist, and imperial party that cannot be pulled left. Briahna says the only use of leftists inside it is to expose it, as in the coming fight over Hakeem Jeffries and the speakership, and she points to the UK Greens and Labour's response. Steve says real socialism has to be anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and that capital keeps us broke and divided, from Bacon's Rebellion to today's scapegoating.
Briahna closes with an inside account of a campaign that never workshopped its message with the person who had to deliver it.
Lies are sticky because the truth takes longer to tell.

Briahna Joy Gray is host of the Bad Faith podcast. A graduate of both Harvard and Harvard Law School, she worked as a corporate litigator before becoming a journalist and political commentator. She has been a contributing editor at Current Affairs, Senior Politics Editor at The Intercept. Briahna was co-host of – and then censored by – The Hill's Rising. She served as National Press Secretary for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.
Find her work: X @briebriejoy, patreon.com/badfaithpodcast, youtube.com/@BadFaithPodcast

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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.

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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.

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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

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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