Ep 380 - Struggle & Resistance: Retelling Vietnam with Luna Nguyen

Ep 380 - Struggle & Resistance: Retelling Vietnam with Luna Nguyen

** This Tuesday, come to Macro ‘n Chill, our online gathering. Bring your insights and questions about this episode. May 19 at 8pm ET/5pm PT Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/AIz56SKPT6Gfh0pXhs3PTw [https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/AIz56SKPT6Gfh0pXhs3PTw] You may know Luna Nguyen as Luna Oi, the YouTuber and member of the Non-Compete content collective who creates videos about culture, history, and politics in Vietnam, as well as panels and interviews with indigenous activists and comrades in the Global South. Steve asked her to come onto the podcast because, as a Vietnamese Marxist-Leninist, she can take us beyond US propaganda and into the lived history of Vietnamese resistance. The conversation goes into Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary development, the application of Marxism-Leninism to Vietnam's reality, French colonialism and Japanese fascism, the 1945 famine and August Revolution, US betrayal after WWII, the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, the nature of the "Resistance War Against Imperialist USA," and the post-war embargo and debt extortion. Luna shares deeply personal family history – her grandfather's death in the Tet Offensive and her mother's childhood survival of a US bombing – grounding the analysis in living memory. She also connects Ho Chi Minh Thought to dialectical and historical materialism, making the case that revolutionary movements must emerge from concrete material conditions. Born and raised in Vietnam, Luna Nguyen is a writer and creator on a mission to share her country’s perspective with the world. She’s currently tackling the ambitious project of translating Vietnam’s official Marxist-Leninist philosophy curriculum into English. In addition to her translation work, she also produces YouTube documentaries that dive into the intersection of Vietnamese culture and politics. Check out her channel https://www.youtube.com/LunaOi/ [https://www.youtube.com/LunaOi/] Free E-books available at https://www.banyanhouse.org/shop/

Ep 379 - The Real Cost of War with L. Randall Wray

** This Tuesday, May 12, come to Macro ‘n Chill, our online gathering where we listen to and discuss this episode. Bring your questions and insights. 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/rn_HAqgaSRGdj8W2UX9aKw [https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/rn_HAqgaSRGdj8W2UX9aKw] Did you think we had abandoned MMT? Well, after a few weeks of tackling some rather prickly topics, we’re back to strictly non-controversial macroeconomics. Heh heh. Just kidding. Don’t get too comfortable. Our old friend Randy Wray is back, bringing his somewhat optimistic belief that a sound reality-based agenda might possibly succeed in the upcoming Congressional elections. But more on that later. First, he and Steve need to dissect Trump’s latest imperialist venture against Iran and expose the bipartisan lie that there are just enough of your tax dollars to pay for war; when it comes to affording social programs, the cupboard is bare. Claims of scarcity are pure ideology. MMT has taught us that the federal government faces no dollar constraints. The real cost of war is measured in diverted labor, wasted resources, destroyed infrastructure, and the steady cannibalization of society’s productive capacity. Not to mention human lives, disabled veterans, and a chain reaction leading to starvation in the Global South. Back to Randy’s guarded optimism, which Steve does not share. Rather than smooth over their differences, they lean into them. Randy believes an anti-neoliberal program could win congressional seats. It would require candidates to break out of the fiscal austerity frame. Steve counters by referring to the Gilens and Page study – showing policy has near-zero correlation with popular will – and a class-lens analysis of manufactured consent. He sees a theatrical oligarchy, not a reformable political system. Since both parties serve capital, there is no electoral path. No possibility of reallocating resources from bombers to bread. The conversation represents an unresolved, essential tension inside the MMT-Marxist synthesis: is monetary sovereignty a tool for working-class liberation blocked only by bad ideas, or is the entire political theater designed to ensure those ideas are never acted upon? L. Randall Wray is a Senior Scholar and Professor of Economics at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and Emeritus Professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is one of the developers of Modern Money Theory and his most recent book on the topic is Understanding Modern Money Theory: Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Elgar, 2025). Find his work at https://www.levyinstitute.org/people/lrandall-wray/ [https://www.levyinstitute.org/people/lrandall-wray/]

Ep 378 - Revisiting the Stalin Eras Part 2: Context Not Caricature with Jeremy of Proles Pod

** Macro ‘n Chill is our weekly online gathering where we listen to the podcast episode and talk about it among friends. This Tuesday, Jeremy of Proles Pod will be with us to answer questions. May 5 at 8pm ET/5pm PT Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/gCOXxGttQryRnQNq-A3NbA [https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/gCOXxGttQryRnQNq-A3NbA] This is Part 2 of Steve’s interview with Jeremy, co-host of Proles Pod, talking about their exhaustive series on the Stalin Eras. It's a nuanced, de-stigmatized discussion about Joseph Stalin and the political reality of the Soviet Union. They begin by dismantling Western misconceptions of dictatorship to explain the actual Leninist methodology of democratic centralism, contrasting it with Western parliamentary systems. Rather than asking whether Joseph Stalin was good or evil, the conversation reframes the question entirely. It situates the Soviet project within the pressures of counter-revolution, imperial encirclement, and internal struggle, while investigating how decisions were actually made inside a socialist state. Jeremy calls out indefensible behavior and debunks long-standing myths. The result is a dialectical examination of power, democracy, and historical development. Proles Pod is an explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist podcast run by four ADHD-addled individuals. Although the foundation of Proles was built on the topic of history, more recently they have branched out into theory, politics, and culture. You can find them anywhere fine podcasts are distributed. Join their Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/ProlesPod/posts [https://www.patreon.com/c/ProlesPod/posts] Check out a teaser for their series, The Stalin Eras: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DP81SiTjQry/ [https://www.instagram.com/reels/DP81SiTjQry/]

Ep 377 - Revisiting the Stalin Eras Part 1: Understanding Democratic Centralism with Jeremy of ProlesPod

** Come to Macro ‘n Chill, our online community gathering, where we listen to and discuss the current episode. This week, Jeremy of Proles Pod will be joining us. If you have questions for him, bring them! Tuesday, April 28th, at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/G7ijDSVmTcKeDc82AAs0XQ [https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/G7ijDSVmTcKeDc82AAs0XQ] Last year, Proles Pod completed a multi-part series on The Stalin Eras. Now Jeremy, one of the co-hosts, joins Steve for a conversation about it, resulting in a two-part dialectical excavation of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Project. The purpose of this exploration is neither to sanctify nor condemn, but to strip away bourgeois mythologies and ground the discussion in material conditions and collective processes. In Part One, Jeremy and Steve look at democratic centralism, where rigorous debate is followed by unified action, then contrast it with the false choice offered by US electoral politics. They draw on Rosa Luxemburg, Julius Nyerere, and materialist analysis of US history (slavery, settler colonialism, Jim Crow as inspiration for Nazi laws), and agree that both Democrats and Republicans serve the same capitalist-oligarchic permanent state. Proles Pod is an explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist podcast run by four ADHD-addled individuals. Although the foundation of Proles was built on the topic of history, more recently they have branched out into theory, politics, and culture. You can find them anywhere fine podcasts are distributed. Join their Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/ProlesPod/posts [https://www.patreon.com/c/ProlesPod/posts] Check out a teaser for The Stalin Eras https://www.instagram.com/reels/DP81SiTjQry/ [https://www.instagram.com/reels/DP81SiTjQry/]

Ep 376 - Modern Monetary Theory & the Question of Democracy with Jim Byrne

** 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 [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 [https://www.udemy.com/course/mmt101-modern-monetary-theory/?couponCode=MMT101COURSECOURSE] 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 [https://mmt101.substack.com/] @MMT101DotORG on X