
Advertise on podcast: Macro N Cheese
Rating
4.8from
This podcast has
300 episodes
Language
EnglishPublisher
Steven D GrumbineExplicit
Yes
Date created
2019/02/14
Latest episode
2026/04/18
Average duration
64 min.
Release period
7 days
Description
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!
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Ep 376 - Modern Monetary Theory & the Question of Democracy with Jim Byrne
2026/04/18
** Questions about MMT? Thoughts about the episode? Come to our online gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. Tuesday, April 21, 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/RkspaP0RSNajdc69bqUmkA
Jim Byrne of MMT101 is back for a conversation that moves beyond the technical mechanics of Modern Monetary Theory to ask the tough questions. While affirming MMT’s core insight that a currency-issuing government doesn’t face financial constraint, only real resource limits, they argue that this knowledge is politically neutered by the structures of capitalism.
Jim lays out a clear, accessible primer on how money actually works and breaks down the scarcity myth. But the real question isn’t can governments act, it’s who they serve when they do.
Looking at the failure of bourgeois democracy, they talk about cultural hegemony and neoliberal ideology as well as class struggle vs. gradualism. The discussion touches on Scotland as a colony of Westminster and the limits of referendums under an imperial state structure.
Ultimately, this is a dialogue that pushes beyond MMT’s insights and asks whether those tools can mean anything without a rupture in the underlying political and economic order.
Jim Byrne has developed an MMT foundation course aimed at beginners and intermediate learners as well as people who already know about economics but are curious about Modern Monetary Theory.
Follow his work and the MMT101 podcast at mmt101.substack.com
@MMT101DotORG on X
Ep 375 - (R)evolutionary Struggle with Steve Grumbine
2026/04/11
** This week’s Macro ‘n Chill might shake us up. Some of us, at least. Come discuss the episode with the community. Tues, April 14, 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/PIf2VnjBS-mwX-Bd4BwWYQ
In a solo episode, Steve sets out to describe and explain some of the shifts in direction for Real Progressives and the podcast, mirroring his own changing perspective. He reflects on a decade or more of championing Modern Monetary Theory, while grappling with a dawning realization. Despite MMT’s crystal clear insights into sovereign currency with the potential for popular federal programs and public investment, the political system itself is a scam.
He describes a journey of discovery (yeah, we know that sounds corny) peeling away the layers to explain the Gilens and Page study and global events. Gaza, US foreign policy, austerity, racism, empire, ramping up of brutal law enforcement within the US... each question leads to another. Weekly guests for Macro N Cheese help provide answers. Significantly, they contribute to the building of an analysis. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Accepting that the US is not a functioning democracy but an oligarchy serving capital, Steve critiques electoralism as a false promise and diversion. He calls for building parallel institutions and class consciousness over 'vote harder' strategies. Real Progressives remains rooted in MMT while integrating revolutionary theory, resistance, and an unsentimental understanding of capitalism.
Steve Grumbine is founder and CEO of Real Progressives and host of Macro N Cheese podcast. Find his work at realprogressives.org and realprogressives.substack.com
@sdgrumbine on X
Ep 374 - Escape From Capitalism with Clara Mattei
2026/04/04
Join our community on Tuesday evening as we listen to and discuss this episode. April 7th at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/nkkVRy2JQbW2Eh4VDtcNHQ
Clara Mattei and her first book, The Capital Order, were hugely important to Real Progressives as we began to expand our focus from Modern Monetary Theory and investigate the political economy of the capitalist system.
Now she joins Steve to talk about her new book, Escape from Capitalism. They discuss how capitalism maintains itself through market dependence, exploitation, and austerity, and why escaping it requires building alternative institutions rather than relying on elections or reforms within the capitalist state.
Steve and Clara are largely aligned in their critique of the system, but there are some disagreements. They debate aspects of MMT, including how interest rates, state spending, and monetary sovereignty function across different contexts. Their differences open up a deeper discussion about the limits of reform, the state's role, and what meaningful change would require.
There is a reason elections cannot deliver emancipation. The capitalist state is structurally designed to insulate elites from popular control. Clara describes her practical organizing work with FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) in Tulsa, building horizontal assemblies, participatory budgeting campaigns, community land trusts, and mutual aid.
Steve touches on the concept of de-commodifying basic needs (housing, healthcare, food), to break market dependence. But then, capitalism would be unworkable.
Clara E. Mattei is Professor of Economics at The University of Tulsa and the Founding President of FREE: Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. She was previously associate professor at The New School for Social Research Economics Department and has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton. Her research contributes to the analysis and history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making.
Clara is author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and the recently published Escape from Capitalism (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, and Simon & Schuster, January 2026), which will soon be translated into multiple languages, including French, German, and Italian.
Learn more @ freefreeforum.org, where she hosts the weekly FREE podcast.
@claraemattei on X
Ep 373 - Is There A Path To Fiat Socialism? with Carlos García Hernández
2026/03/28
Carlos García Hernández, author of Fiat Socialism: Achieving the Goals of Socialism Through Modern Monetary Theory, joins Steve to revisit their discussion of topics covered in his earlier visits to the podcast.
Their dialogue wrestles with a deceptively simple question: if we already have the monetary capacity to guarantee jobs, housing, and public goods, why does capitalism still dominate? Through a sharp exchange, Steve and Carlos explore whether Modern Monetary Theory can be a pathway to socialism or whether deeper structural barriers rooted in class power and imperial dominance stand in the way.
While there’s broad agreement on the failures of neoliberal capitalism and the need to subordinate economic power to political control, tensions emerge around strategy and theory. Carlos leans toward a vision of “fiat socialism” centered on access to goods and services and the transformative potential of monetary sovereignty, while Steve pushes harder on the limits of education alone, emphasizing class struggle, ideology, and the near-impossibility of reform within existing institutions.
The result is less a blueprint and more an investigation that forces us to confront not just what’s possible, but why it isn’t happening.
Carlos García Hernández is the founder and director of Lola Books, a publishing house that has introduced MMT to Spanish and German readers. He is the author of Fiat Socialism: Achieving the Goals of Socialism Through Modern Monetary Theory.
@Carlos_G_H_ on X
Ep 372 - Crisis of Hegemony & the Vassalization of Europe with Thomas Fazi
2026/03/21
** Tuesday evening, March 24, we’ll be listening to and discussing this episode in our online gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/DeGM2oAyRt2O-Xsj1nc4IQ
Thomas Fazi joins Steve to dissect the geopolitical and ideological structures that have rendered Europe strategically subordinate to the United States. Thomas argues that NATO’s true purpose, from its inception, was not to defend Europe but to ensure its vassalization by keeping "the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." He contends that the war in Ukraine was a deliberately provoked conflict designed by US planners to sever Europe’s economic and energy ties with Russia, forcing the EU into deeper dependency on American energy and military infrastructure.
The conversation goes into the weaponization of media narratives and the management of dissent through censorship and “acceptable” politics, connecting the cultural Cold War to today’s crisis of hegemony. Ukraine, Greenland, and Europe’s energy self-sabotage aren’t anomalies, they’re features of an imperial system that requires subordination abroad and confusion at home.
Thomas Fazi is a “journalist/writer/translator/socialist.” who lives in Italy. He is the co-director of Standing Army (2010), an award-winning feature-length documentary on US military bases featuring Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky; and the author of The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent – and How We Can Take It Back (2014) and Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (co-authored with Bill Mitchell, 2017). His articles have appeared in numerous online and printed publications.
Find his work on Substack: thomasfazi.com
@battleforeurope on X
Ep 371 - You Can't Vote Away Colonialism with Fadhel Kaboub
2026/03/14
** Join our community-building online gathering where we listen to the episode together and discuss it in a relaxed, supportive atmosphere. Tuesday, March 17, at 8pm ET/5pm PT. https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/o3miFIPmSAC2d46Vh14iBA
One of our favorite guests is back to talk about the central problem facing much of the Global South. It is not simply bad policy or weak leadership, but the persistence of colonial economic structures. He explains that many countries, especially in Africa, remain trapped in roles designed by empire: exporters of cheap raw materials, importers of finished goods, and sites for low-value production. Political independence did not end these structures, and debt, IMF intervention, and external pressure have only deepened the trap.
"Colonialism and its economic structures were not designed for development, they were not designed for democracy, they were not designed for justice, they were not designed to produce a just transition or human rights or any of these things. If anything, colonialism and its economic structures were hierarchical, abusive, violent, extractive."
Fadhel was one of the economists we originally turned to for our education in MMT. In this conversation with Steve he makes the case that MMT is not a theory of everything. Issues of race, class, and colonialism require their own lenses. Whether the issue is climate change, migration, development, or reparations, the entry point has to be the lived material conditions. MMT becomes crucial when the question turns to how to mobilize resources, avoid debt traps, and finance transformation without inflationary collapse.
Dr. Fadhel Kaboub is a Tunisian American economist. He is an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He’s the author of Global South Perspectives on Substack. In 2025, Dr. Kaboub was recognized by the New Africa Magazine in the top 100 most influential Africans under the Thinkers and Opinion Shapers category. He currently serves a two-year term on the United Nations High Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs at UN DESA.
Find his work at globalsouthperspectives.substack.com
@FadhelKaboub on X
Ep 370 - Empire & Exodus with Erald Kolasi
2026/03/07
Erald Kolasi is back to attack the bourgeois narrative on immigration, which reduces it to a series of individual choices. He and Steve dig into the material roots of migration, showing how empire, land theft, war, labor exploitation, and capitalist crisis have shaped global migration flows for centuries.
They ground the discussion in Wallerstein's world-systems theory, defining an empire not by its internal politics but by its extractive external relations, and trace the concrete historical processes of this extraction. The "migration boomerang" from US destabilization in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador – driven by the needs of capital like the United Fruit Company – demonstrates the dialectic in action.
The empire's domination creates the displaced peoples it then scapegoats to divide the working class. Erald connects this to the long arc of capitalist development, from the Atlantic slave system to the prison-industrial complex, showing how the ruling class has always used race and nationality to prevent united class consciousness.
With the MMT lens, Steve explains that this is directly tied to how a Federal Job Guarantee would shatter this dynamic by eliminating the "reserve army of labor" and the power of capital to discipline workers.
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 on his website, www.eraldkolasi.com.
Subscribe to his Substack: https://substack.com/@technodynamics
Ep 369 - Sarah Connor Warned Us with Peter Byrne
2026/02/28
While we’re being distracted by chatbots and AI gimmicks, Silicon Valley is quietly embedding its products into surveillance systems, border enforcement, battlefield logistics, and even nuclear command-and-control. The real money isn’t in selfies with AI. It’s in Pentagon contracts and permanent war footing.
Investigative reporter Peter Byrne is back to talk with Steve about his 10-part Military AI Watch series at Project Censored. It’s a chilling and materialist analysis of the military-industrial-AI complex.
Naming names and following the funding trails, Peter reveals how firms tied to Palantir, Google, and other tech giants are positioning AI as indispensable to “national security.” Meanwhile, the systems themselves remain prone to hallucination, data poisoning, and catastrophic error.
War games escalate to nuclear exchange. (Does anyone remember War Games, the movie? Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy play a teenage nerd and a popular girl who save the world from the nuclear destruction they almost launched. Sigh... innocent times.) Civilian infrastructure becomes battlefield terrain. And the comforting promise of a “human in the loop” is a marketing slogan instead of a safeguard. 2001: A Space Odyssey eerily feels both prescient and naive by comparison. Hollywood likes to personalize everything. The villain is wacky or evil; it's never the economic system.
As their conversation continues, Steve and Peter look at class power, media complicity, and the illusion that electoral politics alone can rein in a self-directing war machine.
Peter Byrne is an award-winning investigative science reporter who has long uncovered corruption at the nexus of science and industry. Now, in partnership with Project Censored, Byrne has launched Military AI Watch, a groundbreaking ten-part series published on Project Censored’s website.
https://www.projectcensored.org/military-ai-watch/
Find all of Peter’s work here: https://www.peterbyrne.info/
Ep 368 - Socialism Unmade: Confronting Five Centuries of Capital with Ali Kadri
2026/02/21
“...Some are dancing, some are drowning, but in the end everybody’s going to go under.”
Dr. Ali Kadri (Sun Yat-sen University), author of the Unmaking of Arab Socialism, joins Steve to talk about imperialism, development, and why the Arab world keeps getting put through the capitalist meat grinder. Ali argues that capitalism isn’t just markets and greed. It’s a destructive social relationship. Once you look at it that way, many of the world’s mysteries stop being mysterious: war, austerity, pollution, and mass deaths aren’t accidents that occasionally happen to capitalism. They are outcomes to be monetized.
The conversation moves to imperialism as capitalism in its concentrated, caffeinated, and brutal form, especially under finance-dominance. Ali describes genocide as both direct (bombs, occupation, ethnic cleansing) and structural (avoidable hunger, disease, debt-driven collapse). He frames the destruction of Arab socialist and anti-colonial projects as strategic for empire: control of oil, geography, and the political threat of regional solidarity.
They talk about MMT’s explanation of currency and how the dollar functions as a lever. Ali sees the dollar as power, representing control over global resources and labor. Debt dependence becomes a kind of colonization by spreadsheet.
“If the dollar stops for a minute or for a month or so, then we have people going hungry. And so this is a form of colonization, a form of death by the dollar.”
They close by pulling democracy down from the clouds. Steve suggests bourgeois elections merely deliver a reshuffling of managers for the same system, and Ali produces a simple metaphor: a multiple-choice exam. The choices have been pre-loaded. And in elections, the result is still class rule.
Dr. Ali Kadri is a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-sen University. He has previously held senior roles at the National University of Singapore and the London School of Economics. His academic work focuses on the political economy of development, imperialism, and the Arab world. He is the author of several important books, including The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction; China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism; and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.
Ep 367 - MMT & Marxism: Finding Common Ground with Owen Bennett
2026/02/14
Can Marxists and MMTers find common ground, or are they doomed to be strategic enemies?
Steve’s guest is Australian labor historian and organizer Owen Bennett, who founded the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union in 2015, and more recently, Unionists for a Job Guarantee in 2024. He and Steve explore how to tackle the deep divide between Modern Monetary Theory and the Marxist left. Owen argues that the left's current dismissal of full-employment policy is a historic break from a time when communists and unionists successfully fought for – and won – some major concessions under capitalism. We should look to establish that kind of unity.
If the state is a tool of the oligarchs, is fighting for a policy like the Job Guarantee a distraction from revolution, or is it a necessary front in the class war? Steve and Owen discuss austerity, strategy, and whether "socialism or bust" has left the working class with nothing at all.
Owen Bennett is a unionist, university tutor, PhD graduate in labour history, activist, author, and researcher. He has published widely on the history of working class struggles against unemployment in Australia. His book on the struggle for full employment in post-war Australia is forthcoming.
Owen founded the Australian Unemployed Workers Union in 2015 and, more recently, Unionists for a Job Guarantee in 2024.
Ep 366 - Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? with Gabriel Rockhill
2026/02/07
This week Steve invited Gabriel Rockhill to talk about his new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Vol 1 of The Intellectual World War.
The war on communism is about protecting imperial super-profits, keeping cheap labor and resources flowing from the Global South to the imperial core. It has never been about lofty values and freedom fries. So why does the empire care about books, grants, and academic careers?
Gabriel’s investigation begins with a potent symbol: the legacy of Che Guevara. We know the CIA hunted and executed him. Less known is their parallel mission to assassinate the legacy of his thoughts. By seizing and editing his Bolivian diaries, US intelligence and its media assets would control the narrative of his struggle. It’s a microcosm of a vast, systemic project. It reveals that empires understand a fundamental truth: the pen can be mightier than the sword. That might sound trite but think about it: to control populations and maintain global dominance, you must control the realm of thought, the very imagination of what is possible.
The true target of this intellectual war has never been abstract Marxist theory. It is actually existing socialism: the tangible, state-building projects that succeeded in breaking the chains of imperialism. From the Soviet Union and China to Cuba, Vietnam, and beyond, these movements achieved the unthinkable: they halted the imperial value flow. They stopped the hemorrhage of natural resources and cheap labor from the Global South to the capitalist core, claiming their right to self-determination and independent development. This was the existential threat: a model proving that escape from the imperialist world-system was achievable. The panic in the halls of power was not over esoteric debates about Hegelian dialectics, but over the loss of super-profits and the empowering example of successful liberation.
Gabriel and Steve discuss why dialectical and historical materialism is more than just a lofty sounding term. It actually matters. It’s like the anti-virus software for propaganda. Instead of being knocked over every time a new headline drops, we have a framework for seeing patterns. Coups, destabilization, narrative management, the whole traveling circus? They all make sense. And they’re all connected. (In fact, you can’t listen to this episode without hearing the dialectical relationship between material control and the control of ideas.)
Using the Marxist lens, Gabriel analyzes the socioeconomic base of the “theory industry” and a certain brand of Western or academic Marxism that turns class struggle into a grad-seminar aesthetic and cultural war hobby, safely disconnected from organizing, anti-imperialism, and actual movements. He argues the capitalist system naturally fosters and funds ideas that secure its survival, making knowledge production a commodity-driven system focused on exchange value (career advancement, book sales) rather than use value for liberation.
Gabriel isn’t just naming names for sport. (And besides, in the US we already have a long and colorful tradition of naming names, so let’s not be clutching our pearls.) He’s pointing at a system that manufactures respectable “leftist” ideas that don’t threaten empire. As the imperial core becomes more openly brulat at home, we need to reconnect with the international, anti-imperialist thread of revolutionary Marxism if we’re serious about changing anything.
Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic, and activist. He is the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique, Professor of Philosophy and Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University, and Research Associate at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie politique – LAP (EHESS Paris). He is the author or editor of twelve books, including most recently Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025) and Requiem pour la French Theory with Aymeric Monville (Éditions Delga, 2024). He is one of the Editors-in-Chief of the World Marxist Review and a co-director of the AIM—Anti-Imperialist Marxism book series.
Ep 365 - Funding White Supremacy with Robert B. Williams
2026/01/31
Funding white supremacy is a core, not incidental, function of the modern capitalist state in the U.S. It is also the title of economist Robert B. Williams’ 2025 book, Funding White Supremacy: Federal Wealth Policies and the Modern Racial Wealth Gap.
Bob and Steve share the fundamental position that capitalism doesn’t just produce inequality by accident, it builds durable ladders for some and trapdoors for others. Wealth, not income, is the key instrument because it is power that reproduces itself across generations.
Bob lays out the major policy mechanism of stealth wealth-building: how the federal government subsidizes asset accumulation through the tax code, especially via “tax expenditures” (deductions, exclusions, preferential treatment) that provide vast benefits to the wealthy.
From an MMT perspective, the conversation underlines a crucial point: the state’s problem is not “finding the money,” it’s choosing who gets the public subsidy. A system that claims scarcity around public goods reliably mobilizes massive policy support for private asset appreciation and wealth compounding. In other words, benefits reward ownership and existing assets, not the people struggling to acquire them.
Bob situates this historically, tracing the origins of the modern income and estate tax era to the early 20th century and argues that any progressive policy history coexisted with, and was intertwined with, overt white supremacist politics.
Robert B. Williams is the Stedman Professor of Economics, Guilford College. Bob has taught economics and political economy for over 40 years. He has written three books, including Funding White Supremacy: Federal Wealth Policies and the Modern Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Ep 364 - State Money, Class Struggle with Anthony Anastasi
2026/01/24
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
Ep 363 - Venezuela's Unfinished Revolution with Ricardo Vaz
2026/01/17
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
Ep 362 - Debunking the Institutional Theory of Economic Development with Erald Kolasi
2026/01/10
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
Podcast reviews
Read Macro N Cheese podcast reviews
EdeTM 2026/03/01
Grumbine is
among the few speaking the truth today about politics, modern monetary theory, the dehumanizing of others not in the popular media belief system, and ...
mlizholm 2026/01/16
Best Actual Money & Economic Podcast
You want to learn how money & the economy actual work? Stop listing to the lies both sides of the media, politicians & institutions use that keep you ...
Crystalash 2025/12/28
In these times
Theories and praxis to combat the capitalist malaise. I still can’t believe it’s produced all by a team of volunteers! The quality of topics and depth...
foolish shogun 2025/12/06
Hands Down The Best Politics and Economics Podcast Out There
Grumbine always brings the fire with enlightening guests to discuss a variety of topics from macroeconomics to political economy, from domestic to int...
EagleM16 2025/07/21
Everything you know is wrong
Everything about economics anyway. This podcast has interesting guests, interesting commentary. I just hope that everyone else will figure it before w...
Blue Huron 2025/02/15
China
Ever watch videos of China they are an awful country. Watch the China show.
Jesus/Stalin 2025/01/18
Good show
I listened all the way through and felt hopeful thanks Im not alone
Stlrod2 2024/07/14
Truth to Power, EXCELLENT!
Uncovers how broken our system is, explaining how MMT can be used to make positive progressive changes improving outcomes for people over corporations...
JimV 1 2023/12/31
Great Pod!!
Great Pod!!
Briar_R0se 2023/12/03
Great guests, host is a piece of work.
Steve comes off as a highly narcissistic clout chaser who appears resentful to the universe for not sufficiently recognizing his importance. He’ll be...
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