Macro N Cheese

Ep 370 - Empire & Exodus with Erald Kolasi

** We’ll discuss this episode on Tuesday, March 10th (8 pm ET/5 pm PT) in our online community gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. We’ve invited Erald Kolasi to join us. So bring your questions. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/hvkv5uyKQkG8DvgUMCckcw [https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/hvkv5uyKQkG8DvgUMCckcw] 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 [https://www.eraldkolasi.com/]. Subscribe to his Substack: https://substack.com/@technodynamics [https://substack.com/@technodynamics]

Ep 369 - Sarah Connor Warned Us with Peter Byrne

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/ [https://www.projectcensored.org/military-ai-watch/] Find all of Peter’s work here: https://www.peterbyrne.info/ [https://www.peterbyrne.info/]

Ep 368 - Socialism Unmade: Confronting Five Centuries of Capital with Ali Kadri

“...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

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

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 [https://criticaltheoryworkshop.com/], 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.