Episode 163 – The Intersection of Marx and MMT with 1Dime

Macro N Cheese – Episode 163
The Intersection of Marx & MMT with 1Dime
March 12, 2022

 

[00:00:03.530] – 1Dime [intro/music]

Private property is basically a form of capital. It’s an ownership property that you can use to make more money, usually by exploiting others, whether it be through labor or through collecting rents.

[00:00:18.030] – 1Dime [intro/music]

To, first of all, invest in cryptocurrency as an investment in property, you have to have money to spend. Most leftists I know, including myself, don’t have that.

[00:00:31.510] – 1Dime [intro/music]

America is a one-party state. And in typical American fashion, they have two of them like they have with every product, Coke and Pepsi. You got to give that consumer choice.

[00:01:42.110] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.090] – Steve Grumbine

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today we’re going incognito. I’ve got my good friend, fellow YouTuber and all-around smart guy Tony from 1Dime, who is a leftist that runs the YouTube channel 1Dime and produces video essays and mini-documentaries on issues and concepts in political economy, critical theory, and society.

He is a proponent of both Marxist theory and Modern Monetary Theory. And for those of you who listen to me doing my video show – Monday, Wednesday, Friday – called “The Rogue Scholar,” I’ve had Tony on with me there as well. So check it out. Without further Ado, Tony, welcome to the show, sir.

[00:02:31.390] – 1Dime

Happy to be here. I’ve been a longtime listener. Well, long time, as in nine months, listener of Macro N Cheese, and was actually listening to a lot of the appearances of the MMT scholars when I was doing research for my Deficit Myth video, mainly because I wanted to see if I was digesting what I was learning from Warren Mosler’s book, Soft Currency Economics and Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth.

Kind of wanted to see if I was getting it. So I found your podcast and I always look forward to that intro music. That’s actually the only reason why I listen. It’s the intro music.

[00:03:05.050] – Grumbine

That’s great. For those that don’t know, the intro music is twofold. You’ve got the beginning, which is my brother’s former band called In Theory. Ironically, way before I knew about MMT in the early two-thousands. And they wrote that song, See Through, which is talking about the lies you tell me. Am I that “see-through,” or is it only in my mind (that) I can’t break free?

So I begged my brother, “can we use this for the podcast?” He said, “I forgot I even wrote that song. Sure, go ahead.” The whole band, I went to each of them, said, “do you mind?” (And they all replied,) “At least it’ll be used by somebody. We forgot about that a decade ago.” So that’s part of it. And then the other part with Bernie and Sarah Palin and borrowing from China.

Yeah, that came from Geoff Ginter, who was part of Real Progressives at the time and has been a friend of ours for a number of years. And he created that for us. So between my brother’s band In Theory and Geoff Ginter, you’ve got two mashups. And then, of course, the wicked baseline that you hear on the interludes when we’re talking over it, that is Donovan Willis, and he is one heck of a bass player even to this day.

So there’s your intro to the intro music. And let’s get on with you. Tony, I’m so glad to have you on here. The subject we’re going to talk about today, I think is probably one of the most important ones for the space that we inhabit, because Marxism has been around for a very long time. And I guarantee you the average person isn’t even what I would call a volume one Marxist.

They haven’t even read volume one of Marx, but most people go by what they’ve heard someone else say; or maybe they’ve listened to a few podcasts, but largely the space is just not known. And there isn’t a lot of really great synthesis out there about Marx and MMT. And we’ve addressed that with Nathan Tankus on the show. We’ve addressed some of it with Steve Keen at various times.

But this is going to be a deep dive into this because we just need to talk about we need activists to understand that MMT is not some boogeyman to lift up capitalism and push Marxism aside. There’s a lot of really important information here. So based on your understanding of MMT, and I’m presuming that you came to MMT after you had already learned about Marx. Is that fair?

[00:05:27.520] – 1Dime

Oh, much later. I was into Marxism much before. I probably was more of like a Keynesian social Democrat around 2016; I discovered Marxism more after the first Bernie Sanders defeat, read most of the associated literature with the likes of Marx and Lenin. So I wouldn’t now label myself too specifically, mainly just because when people ask what ideology you identify with, it’s often a historical question.

People assume that if you are a Marxist, you cosign everything that is with the history of Marxism, such as Marxism Leninism. And I do not. So I’m careful to label myself, but in terms of where (I am) in the marketplace of ideologies, so to speak, I find myself leaning the closest to Marxism in terms of its method, because it sees things through the lens of class struggle and puts forth a first and foremost materialist view of history.

I think that’s very important because typically a lot of people will look at history as an evolution of ideas and we’ll look at the individual as isolated from society. Marxism looks at things as an interconnected totality filled with contradictions. I think the word dialectical is often thrown around by Marxists. A lot of people don’t know what it means.

But put simply, dialectics is looking at contradictions between things. You can’t explain the world through one dimensional narratives. There are contradictions. For example, people often talk about the elites versus the people. You hear that a lot with both right and left populist pundits. Marxists wouldn’t see it as so simple. Even though you hear about the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, the working class.

The capitalist class, the elites, so to speak, do not always have the same interests. It’s not always so obvious. For example, with Covid, you had some capitalists who benefited from Covid, (and) many who were hurt by it. It’s not so simple. So that’s why I consider myself a Marxist. I got into MMT much later, mainly because I always did not believe the deficit myth; it’s very prevalent where I live in Canada, and I know it’s also prevalent in the United States, Britain, (and) Australia.

And I always doubted it, mainly because I figured if the deficit was such a big deal, wouldn’t people be calling for cuts in spending and tax increases? And typically, the people who are the biggest deficit hawks, the conservative parties, are for lowering taxes. I always thought this is the biggest contradiction ever. And then I saw how the biggest deficit hawks like Reagan ran the biggest deficits.

So there (were) all these contradictions I always knew. So I always didn’t believe that the deficit was a problem like people said it was. But I didn’t really consider the things that MMT points out, such as taxes do not fund government spending at a federal level. I still believed the idea that you have to tax the rich to fund these social programs, and also believed in the typical neoclassical ideas of inflation that if you create more money, it’s automatically worth less and you have higher prices, et cetera.

So it wasn’t until, really, Covid, in the response of the trillions of dollars of spending under the Cares Act with Trump and even more so with Biden. That’s when I saw it was a bit obvious at this point that something’s up. That’s something that we hear typically is not explained by any of the theories we have. Because I don’t see Marxism really understanding the monetary operations of today in a Fiat currency world, and that can explain how all these things are “paid for” without raising taxes.

Even old-school Keynesian theory doesn’t explain that. We know Keynesians, or so-called Keynesians like Paul Krugman, used to, just a few years ago, be talking about “how are we going to pay for” this and that. I didn’t look into this until I saw Stephanie Kelton’s lectures because I was just searching about the deficitit myth and saw her lectures, then decided to read her book, and I found Mosler.

Then I found the whole world of it; Randall Wray, etc. I really didn’t see MMT as a threat to Marxism because, to me, it’s like comparing apples and oranges. They’re two different theories that are designed to explain different things. Modern monetary theory is about understanding monetary operations in a Fiat currency world; how things are financed.

It’s a narrow theory, but it’s very well-designed for what it seeks to explain, whereas Marxism is much more an inherently political theory, but it focuses more on labor; class conflict. I didn’t see these things as diametrically opposed to each other, but I think many do, because many people see MMT as a political program, as indistinguishable from social democracy, which historically has been at odds with Marxism.

I think it’s important for us to distinguish MMT as a theory (from) MMTers as people who have often very differing opinions, as I’m sure you know. That’s how I would like to view it; distinguish MMT versus MMTers. And if you see it that way, I think it’s much easier for Marxists to have some common ground with MMTers because I think both sides benefit from the theories.

[00:10:49.510] – Grumbine

I would say the vast majority of MMT scholars, and what you would term regular MMTers, are either trained in Marx or consider themselves to be Socialists at some level. I don’t know how many would actually raise your hand and say I’m a Communist,  (1Dime: I would),  but I would say a lot of them, (like) Kalecki, there’s a bunch of different economists that fit into that folder.

I think Bill Mitchell would call himself the Kalecki socialist. There are Marx’s fingerprints all over Steve Keen in his work, even though he’s more of an adjacent. He’s definitely one of us, but he’s got some opinions of his own that take him outside of the MMT norm. But one of the things I think is important to bring up, and I hope we can talk about this.

The MMTers are presenting a new synthesis. They’re trying to provide a new political analysis of decision making, but the economics are pretty much Ops-manual-level stuff. You put this pipe in here, you plug this thing in there, it works. Here’s how it happens. So, to deny that part of MMT is to deny reality, but to understand that everybody comes at this from a different perspective.

In other words, they’re bringing their goals to the MMT table, looking through the MMT lens, as it’s frequently referred to, and coming up with prescriptive policies based on an understanding of MMT, but adding in their political desires. But I would venture to say that while MMT is growing and becoming more mature, that there is a political economy analysis that MMT will seek to put forward.

I think it already exposes the heart when you understand what goals and dreams people have and the way they apply their knowledge within that lens. What are your thoughts about what I just said? And then let’s go deeper into that.

[00:12:53.350] – 1Dime

Yeah. So you mentioned some people who are in the MMT side who consider themselves socialist; I would want to make a distinction there. Obviously, the term socialist is very muddy and has a lot of historical baggage. But for Marxists, the word socialist and communist are used interchangeably. For Marx and for Lenin. Socialism is lower-phase communism, and it’s part of the larger project to high-phase communism.

It never has been achieved, obviously, because most of the “actually existing socialist countries” have been sort of stuck in a phase of what is called the dictatorship of the proletariat, a phase before low-phase communism. So the way a lot of people who are not Marxists see socialism and communism is typically more (like) the idea of socialism as workers owning the means of production, and communism is that, but classless and moneyless and stateless, of course.

And so the problem is, I think a lot of so called socialists today are really social Democrats of a more radical variety who fundamentally have a social Democratic project, but have some socialistic ideas in the sense that they’ll be in favor of something like workplace democracy and worker ownership. I think that’s the difference between someone like Jeremy Corbyn (or) Bernie Sanders, versus FDR or versus older welfare capitalists, or even someone like Elizabeth Warren.

They’re Social Democrats, but they have some socialistic ideas. It’s important to make the distinction because while they may be socialist, they’re not Marxist, at least in terms of they still see that you can use the current existing state, don’t change anything, don’t change the parliamentary structure, don’t change the Constitution, and you can achieve these policies merely by using the federal government’s spending power and legislative power.

I tend to be very critical of this, and if you want, we can get into my critiques of MMTers and Social Democracy later, just because it’s a very complicated critique. But I could suggest some of my videos because I think my thoughts could be in many ways summarized by a lot of the videos I produce. My two most recent videos are one on “The Deficit Myth”, which is pretty much an explanation of Modern Monetary Theory, and the other one, the most recent one, is called The Problem with Taxing the Rich, which I think by and large MMTers would agree with.

Now here’s the problem. I call out those who think that we can pay for things by taxing the rich, and I debunk all the economic illiteracy that MMTers seek to debunk. And I use in those videos mainly Warren Mosler’s work, Stephanie’s Work, and David Graber’s Debt work when I debunk the origin of money originating from barter. In that video for those who have watched it and may notice, as I say, that the problem is that taxing the rich, even though it can be used to reduce inequality.

Not only is it hard to implement in reality just because it’s so easy to avoid taxes and prevent them from being pushed through Congress, but it also doesn’t even get at the root of inequality. It’s still, at the end of the day, a Band Aid solution, because what taxing the rich does, is it ameliorates inequality that happens. It doesn’t prevent inequality on a mass scale from happening.

And what is the root cause of inequality? You can find the answers in Marx and in classical Liberals, the good classical Liberals like Jean Jacques Rousseau, not the bad ones like John Locke. You can find (that) the answer is, private property is the root (of) positive inequality. Now this doesn’t mean that you should just abolish private property right away. Or that to clarify: what is private property?

It’s not just things you own that’s personal property. Your toothbrush is your personal property, your car is personal property. Private property is basically a form of capital. It’s an ownership property that you can use to make more money, usually by exploiting others, whether it be through labor or through collecting rents. Those are the main things that matter.

I think we should be looking at solutions to limit how much private property people are allowed to own, how many homes people can own. Why should anyone own more than two homes? I think that’s a serious question we should be asking, that I frankly don’t see the MMTers, social Democrats or most of the modern left asking, but I do see this is a thing that’s been very much vocalized by Marxists and anarchists, people who do see private property as the core problem.

So that’s something to start with. If we are to take inequality seriously, let’s get at its root. And it’s not only, I think, good for moral reasons, it’s good for environmental reasons. Think about how decadent the rich are. Often they have these huge pools that have more water than an Indigenous reserve. It’s absolutely disgusting. Often they just take up so much space, it’s bad for the Earth, and they have these huge lawns that are bad for the Earth.

And it’s just morally decadent in the sense that we’re approaching a revolution, especially in the United States, that looks a lot like France before the French Revolution. Do we want that? I think even social Democrats could take some lessons from Marxists in this regard.

[00:18:07.390] – Grumbine

Couldn’t agree more. People in this space that would call themselves Marxists, that might even call themselves communists, that are heavily invested in trying to acquire crypto and become rich, and the Silicon Valley oligarchs that are just akin to the Wall-Street-variety oligarchs and finance capitalists are doing the exact same strategies through electronic NFTs and things like that.

This seems like a major contradiction in what we’re trying to achieve as a Marxist-Leninist, or an MMT, community. It seems like this whole concept of finance capital, which I believe Lenin spoke very forcefully about.

[00:18:52.720] – 1Dime

Yeah. Imperialism, the highest age of capitalism. Classic text.

[00:18:56.400] – Grumbine

Yes. In the final chapter where he does the overview of it, it is really powerful. It feels like you’re reading a newspaper today, and I believe that finance capitalism is what is driving those housing purchases and speculation. And quite frankly, I see no difference between that and the crypto craze. What are your thoughts there?

[00:19:20.110] – 1Dime

There’s a lot of things there for sure.

[00:19:22.310] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:19:23.590] – 1Dime

With cryptocurrency, I really don’t see many leftists involved in that. By and large, most leftists, especially the Socialists, have a very negative view of cryptocurrency. A lot of it is justified. Some of it, I think, is misunderstood because when I refer to cryptocurrency, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. This is where I tread a bit carefully, because it’s not something I talk about on my YouTube channel or podcast very often.

With that said, I would say from what I’ve learned from people who know more about cryptocurrency than I do, such as someone you had on your podcast recently called The Blockchain Socialist. Yes. I tend to separate blockchain from cryptocurrency and from NFTs because there is a lot of potential in what is called blockchain technology.

It’s a very interesting thing, and I think it has some emancipatory uses and so does cryptocurrency to a limited degree in the sense that, for example, Julian Assange had his bank accounts frozen and then had his PayPal frozen in response to pressure from the government (but) was able to raise money through Bitcoin. And I think that is pretty interesting and useful, and activists could take note of that.

There’s also other cryptocurrencies that aren’t Bitcoin. There’s Etherium, that’s far less environmentally wasteful, and there’s others in the making, so I think it’s a young space. I’m not too quick to discount it, but I would be quick to dismiss the libertarian hysteria around cryptocurrency, which I find super-annoying and politically diametrically opposed to MMT and Marxism.

[00:20:55.400] – Grumbine

The focus for me is on the speculative gambling.

[00:20:59.060] – 1Dime

Yeah, I think that’s done.

[00:21:00.570] – Grumbine

That is where I focus on, because the hysteria around it is not based in trying to help Julian Assange. It’s based on somebody thinking that if they invest in this, that they too can become part of that wealthy money class. People that should know better, that are supposed to be fighting against finance capital. They’re not elevating the blockchain platform and the concept of that emancipatory prescription.

And so is that the Marxism, or is that the MMT, that I want to advance with my activism and media work? And the answer is an unequivocal no. I also just recently spoke with Rohan Grey on Status Coup, and Rohan  painted a different picture. He tried to explain that there are uses and pools of affinity groups that have different applications, so he was less dismissive as well. It’s not those applications that I take issue with. It is the mindset of Wall Street, (for) which the model is fraud.

[00:22:01.990] – 1Dime

I agree, and I don’t think we can really control that or that it’s a problem on the left, mainly because to first of all invest in cryptocurrency as an investment in profit, you have to have money to spend. Most leftist I know, including myself, don’t have that. So that’s what draws people most often to leftist politics is, one is usually working class of some sort.

If you’re rich and have money to spend, why would you be a leftist? Doesn’t make any sense. Inversely, if you’re a working class person, why would you be a right wing libertarian? It defies our basic class interests. So with regards to cryptocurrency and what that represents, I think anything will be co-opted by finance capital. And that’s just the reality. Let’s look at the technology like automation.

Automation is being used in a way that largely does not benefit the working class. It’s basically displacing people from jobs. The extent to which that is happening, I think, is exaggerated. I don’t think automation is behind the majority of job loss, but it’s certainly a thing. And it was even more of a phenomenon in the 1960s and 70s, where automation pretty much wiped out a lot of industry in the United States and in Canada.

But can automation be good for the left? Absolutely. Do we want to work less? Yes. Do we want more access to nice things at cheaper cost with less exploitation? Absolutely. So I think it can be used positively. Cryptocurrency, I think by and large, is used in a pretty terrible, useless, decadent way. But there’s some countries who struggle against US imperialism who are using a cryptocurrency to escape US sanctions, to do business without US dollars, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.

So I would look at it like in that dialectical way, in the Marxist way, which is there’s contradictions. There are contradictions in everything, and it’s not a binary way. We have to look at it with its contradictions and accept it that way. And I tend to not do things moralistically as well. That’s another thing I kind of inherited from Marxism, I guess, is that I tend to view things in terms of the material realities and the contradictions as opposed to morally, because I find with moral issues, people can get tunnel vision, and that can be bad for critical thinking.

[00:24:21.170] – Grumbine

Sure. That’s great insight. So let’s get back to the initial Marxist perspective. We were talking originally about Marx and how some of the MMT insights would have been impossible for him to grasp. There was a lot of what would turn out to be Austrian thinking. Quantity, commodity, money, things like that. So let’s take a look at Marxism as you know it, and what we can glean from a Marxist perspective on money and the theory in and of itself.

[00:24:57.970] – 1Dime

Yeah, absolutely. I found learning MMT is both a blessing and a curse, because when you learn it, you can’t unsee certain realities. And it gets frustrating when you hear people say something that is totally correct and then ruin it all with some economic illiteracy.

[00:25:14.650] – Grumbine

Happens all the time.

[00:25:15.950] – 1Dime

It happens all the time.

[00:25:17.080] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:25:17.330] – 1Dime

So you’ll be hearing someone like Chris Hedges, who will be saying all the right things and they’ll say the US is wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. And it’s like, no, stop it, Chris. I often give credit to Richard Wolff because Richard Wolff, who’s a pretty famous Marxist economist that people know he’s on YouTube, Democracy at work. Richard Wolff now says that Marxism and MMT are a marriage made in heaven or something.

The extent of how much he knows MMT, I think is questionable, but he seems to know enough to accept its premises, which I like, because Richard Wolf a few years ago had totally archaic views of money and he has a video on YouTube that explains government bonds and that the US is relying on the money of billionaires in China to fund itself.

And that’s why the US isn’t implementing progressive policies. It’s because the rich people effectively own the government by buying government bonds. And we know that’s nonsense. Yes, rich people totally influence the government. That’s undeniable, but through other means, not government bonds, which are savings accounts. So when you hear stuff like that, it’s very frustrating.

And also I’ll be sometimes reading some Marxists like Paul Cockshott, who has a book called “Towards a New Socialism” that I think is very innovative, outlines a cybernetic Communist future that overcomes contradictions of the USSR and all the stuff like that. And then he ruins it all by saying we’re going to fund the Internet through tax revenue. And it’s like, why would the government need its own currency?

They don’t ask the basic questions. And this is what I think is good about any sort of emerging theory or what any sort of theory needs to have to be a good theory. It has to ask the basic questions that we take for granted. That’s what MMT does. It asks the questions we all assume are too stupid to even ask. Where does money come from? How can the government run out of its own currency?

How can a pool be drained before it’s filled? It’s almost like a fact that’s undeniable. You don’t have to be an MMTer to realize these insights, to be fair, but MMT is the only theory I know of that really articulates this in a very scientific way. And that’s another thing Marxism and Marxists claim to be, “science.”

The extent to whether that’s the case—I sometimes doubt whether any political theory can be a science—but insofar as it tries to be, it must always adapt itself to new economic changes, such as the use of fiat money instead of commodity money and new findings in anthropology. So if Marxism wants to be a science, I think it has to accept the assumptions of Modern Monetary Theory if it wants to be viable as a science.

Because I think, frankly, when understood and taken to their full conclusions, the insights of Modern Monetary Theory are irrefutable. One can argue about its politics and its solutions. Like, for example, what the solutions to inflation are I think are still very debatable. And there’s many as well with Modern Monetary Theory politics.

They believe in things like a federal jobs guarantee, universal health care, and various big government programs that often Marxists do want. But I think there’s a disagreement as to how we get there. So that part is prescriptive. That’s subjective to a certain extent, and I think we need to look at it that way.

[00:29:18.970] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin and Instagram.

[00:29:44.770] – Grumbine

Let me jump in there. The thing with the federal job guarantee that is very challenging for people to wrap their heads around is a fundamental, not prescriptive, but actual part of the core function and gets you to peak MMT optimized economy.

[00:30:03.170] – 1Dime

It is, but it’s prescriptive how you get there.

[00:30:05.980] – Grumbine

Sure. But let me explain this. I had to go through this because it took a lot for me to understand how a program could be core when MMT itself just is, it’s a lens, but to optimize an economy given a state currency, the state created unemployment by issuing the tax, and that makes people’s heads explode because they think taxes fund spending. So how could that be?

But the other aspect of that is the job guarantee fixes that which the tax destroyed. The business cycle itself naturally has a dialectical situation. They need to get the worker at the lowest cost and reduce expenses to maximize surplus value. So the business has no incentive to create full employment. And the only way to create that full employment is to make it part of the government solution. Since the government created the tax, it has the responsibility to create the solution, which is the job guarantee.

[00:31:04.190] – 1Dime

Yeah, that’s actually a segway almost to my next point.

[00:31:08.070] – Grumbine

Go for it.

[00:31:09.320] – 1Dime

MMT is a lens on one hand, but when taken to its conclusion, it is very obvious that something like a federal jobs guarantee is needed to stabilize the economy, and there’s no excuse not to have it in the same way that one can be a Marxist, but one cannot take Marxism to its full conclusion, which is capitalism must run its course before socialism, but we can’t just keep capitalism.

It will get to the point of collapse and we have to overcome it via socialism or low phase communism, however you want to phrase it. And I think there are some bad critiques from Marxists about MMT, but there are some very good critiques. One of which is sort of related to what you were saying, in that, on one hand, modern monetary theory advocates for federal job guarantees.

But Marxists can poke a big hole into why that is not so easy to do in a capitalist system, mainly because capitalism requires or prefers a reserve army of labor, as Marx called it, which is basically a group of people that are intentionally kept unemployed so that wages can be driven down and so that workers have to compete with each other for jobs as opposed to employers competing for employees.

Now this keeps wages low. It also makes it harder for workers to quit their jobs. Capitalists hate full employment for the same reason they would hate something like universal basic income, because then you can quit your job, get a job somewhere else. They don’t want to do that. At the end of the day, they want power over their employees.

And this is contradictory because don’t capitalists, or at least capitalist politicians, say that they want economic growth? That’s the thing that they say. Right. But economic growth usually comes in the periods of capitalism that are the least capitalistic, in the periods of social democracy, or welfare capitalism, when there is a very low unemployment rate, a federal jobs guarantee which somewhat existed in the United States and many European countries after World War II and the Great Depression.

This is good for economic growth. But capitalists don’t want this because it increases the bargaining power of workers and the fear, which is what people like, the Austrian school, the proto-neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek, they feared this because they thought that as workers get more bargaining power and as a state has more control over business, we can get into a stage that could look like socialism or could get close to it.

And I think they’re partially correct in a certain sense. And that’s why we should be for these things. That’s why I think these policies that are associated often with social democracy, which are also advocated by Socialists I don’t think are a threat to Marxism. They’re an aid to it in many ways.

[00:33:55.100] – Grumbine

You said something about a UBI. The person who advocated strongest for this was the helicopter-money-dropper himself, Milton Friedman, who nobody has confused as a leftist.

[00:34:06.510] – 1Dime

But he wanted to remove the welfare state.

[00:34:08.510] – Grumbine

That’s right. They want to destroy any vestige of the New Deal. I found it fascinating that of all people that would be the number one advocate for that, it would be Milton Friedman.

[00:34:21.070] – 1Dime

Yeah. The thing is, I don’t think Milton Friedman thought that out very well.

[00:34:25.520] – Grumbine

He didn’t think much out.

[00:34:26.720] – 1Dime

Yeah, well, in some ways he did, because in many ways he is the voice of the capitalist class, just giving an ideology a rationale for basically redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich in the form of income. So the thing with UBI is that it’s pretty pointless if there’s no rent controls or if there’s no welfare state, because then landlords can just jack up rents, prices can go through the roof, then people will be just as poor as before, maybe even more poor.

So what’s the point of that. But the thing is, I think people often forget or underestimate how hard it is to actually get change done in the US government system, even for the right, even more for the left. But it’s actually hard for the right to completely overthrow the welfare state. They had to usually do it very slowly. They’ve been cutting it slowly over time, through decades.

It’s been like that way in Canada too. And the reason why I brought up UBI is not so much because I think it’s better than a jobs guarantee. Quite the inverse. I think a jobs guarantee is much better. I’m not opposed to a universal basic income only after we have universal basic services, but for now, I think it’s more of something that will add more contradictions to capitalism than fix them, which could be good for the accelerationist Marxists out there that want to see these contradictions intensify.

But, with UBI, I noticed something in Canada we had during Covid, something called CERB, which was a $2,000 payment every month to anybody who lost their job because of Covid or can’t work. And this was a way to just keep up aggregate demand and preventing the economy from collapse and also just preventing uprisings.

The thing is, capitalists hate this, and the Conservative Party have argued and successfully got this policy removed because it hurt the business class. This led to a great resignation where people suddenly felt, oh, I could quit my job. And a lot of people realize, especially the people who worked in alienating bullshit jobs that they did not like. So this is not good, obviously, for leverage of capitalists.

That’s kind of why I brought it up, is that at the end of the day, this whole capitalist system, there’s one thing that both Keynesian economics and neoclassical economics always obfuscates, and that is class conflict. Capitalism is based on class conflict. The interests of the capitalist owning class are diametrically opposed to the working class. People want to pretend it is not the case.

They like to think of economic growth. But capitalists are often perfectly okay with not having any economic growth. They’re okay as long as they get their profits. It doesn’t matter whose expense that is at. And I think that’s important to understand. For example, let’s look at the Federal Reserve, which operates on a neoliberal monetarist framework.

They keep interest rates high or low to keep what we know is the natural rate of unemployment, the NAIRU, intentionally. Obviously, it’s not natural at all. It’s deliberately trying to keep unemployment high enough to the point where there’s less bargaining power for workers and optimal profits for firms. This framework, so to speak, is intentionally for the capitalist class, and it’s not something that modern monetary theorists advocate for.

It should be obvious, but this isn’t obvious to a lot of people. A lot of people think that monetarism is part of monetary theory or that quantitative easing is part of it. But this is what we need to know. There is very clear, explicit class interest in what the government fiscal and monetary policy does. The thing I notice with people like Warren Mosler, who I love, by the way, I love listening to Warren Mosler, but he tends to talk about these people in charge as if they’re just stupid and as if they’re ignorant and that they have no idea how the system works.

And I think he kind of partly knows that they’re not just stupid. He calls them innocent frauds, but I don’t think they’re innocent. They’re not, or frauds. They’re intentionally there to basically make the working class suffer for the ruling class. So I think if we look at that way, it becomes a lot more clear that we can’t just as Progressives or leftists, Socialists, whoever’s listening identifies with can’t just hop in and replace the current state and implement the progressive policies.

There needs to be a structural change regarding the institutions and the laws so that they fit with our agendas because the way the current Constitution (that’s another conversation), and institutions like the Federal Reserve operate are structurally rated to benefit the interests of neoliberal capitalism.

[00:39:02.480] – Grumbine

Absolutely. I love Warren. He’s like a father figure to me, but he’s got his perspective. I don’t have to be lock step with Warren Mosler. I never quibble over whether he’s correct about MMT because it’s his insight. It’s true. However, when it comes to political economy and understanding class struggle, there are people that have focused their entire lives on understanding class struggle.

It’s not taught in schools. We are a very propagandized nation. So to your point, we have to change hearts and minds, which is what I think the value of MMT is. I think MMT is a much easier concept to show there’s something not right. Let us show you what it is. And so I think you get to that Rosa Luxemburg “Reform or Revolution” moment where you realize that all this stuff is possible.

MMT shows it clearly. But we’ve got fraud, we’ve got corruption baked into the system that prevents meaningful change from happening. We have institutions to protect private property and capital.

[00:40:09.760] – 1Dime

Yes.

[00:40:10.610] – Grumbine

And everything that a working class society based on Marxist-Leninist critique would not be able to survive under. And so there is structural change that must take place. A lot of the pushback I get in personal evangelism is from people that say, how come all the MMTers I see are fighting within the Democratic Party when the party took out Bernie Sanders; laughs and mocks us as “these crazy lefties.”

Why do we have to cajole the capitalist Democratic Party? So they reject MMT not because of what it says, but because of the party affiliations of many of the leading voices. That’s what they’re seeing. They’re in the belly of the beast fighting against the very people that we should be fighting. So because of the nature of our Constitution and the structure of the duopoly, you’re left with very few choices if you want to impact legislation.

So if you understand their perspective, they are trying to change the system. Now, are they successful? We’ve seen moments. I think we’ve won the public debate at some level, but this inflation story is creating a whole new wave. But the point I’m making from a perspective of class struggle and you realize the Democrats have robbed us of our voice.

Any pretense of free and fair primaries or elections to be seen as a monetary theory that is going to change the world. But it’s within the Democratic Party that has done everything to destroy working class people. I think that creates a new vacuum of people that are saying, I don’t want to hear anything about MMT.

[00:41:54.910] – 1Dime

Yeah. Interestingly. Stephanie Kelton in her book expresses how she tried to explain MMT to so many Democratic politicians, and they would either be unaware or if they did become aware of it, they actively refused to espouse it partially due to electoral reasons, not wanting to be ousted from political office. But also I think the unspoken part of that is that it doesn’t fit their own agendas and of their donors.

And I think she realized this because then she directed focus to changing public opinion rather than trying to persuade the politicians. And I think that’s the correct path because these politicians do not have our vested interests at heart. A politician that gets donations from billionaires and millionaires is not going to listen to people who are not billionaires and millionaires, they’re going to give preferential treatment to those who give them the most money.

That’s pretty much common sense. I think it segways well, too. I have a video. It’s one of my favorites, called “Why Billionaires Prefer Democrats.” It’s one of my older videos and it’s a Marxist analysis of the capitalist state and of the two party system. The title is a bit clickbaity because obviously, if you take up the aggregate amount of billionaires who support Democrats or Republicans, it’s usually either even or slightly tilted to the Republicans. Right.

But, you see, the biggest billionaires in the world actually historically voted Democrat and donated more to Democrat politicians, at least in the recent three decades, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and even Mark Zuckerberg. Usually they give to both parties. But the point of that video, I would encourage those to watch it because if I titled it “Marxist analysis of the state,” not many people would watch it, whereas I titled it something flashy so people would watch it.

But the way this two party system works (and the way I like to break it down) is: you have the two parties and the state are structurally created to maintain the long-term and short-term interests of capitalism. Now, this is important to break down because a lot of people, when they say that we have a corporate democracy or a fake democracy ruined by corporations, they think that’s the case only because politicians get donations from politicians and that the solution thereby would be to get money out of politics.

Sure. That’s I think a good step, we should do that, obviously, have a big restriction of campaign finance, maybe even on how rich someone is allowed to be to participate in public office. But that alone is not what the capitalist state is, or why it’s capitalist. Who founded the United States of America? Who founded Canada? Who founded Australia?

Rich, white settlers, the wealthiest landowners, who created the Constitution. The richest people in the country. It is not a coincidence that the Constitution is structurally geared to preserve the Liberty of private property rights. This is really important because I even see leftists who invoke the Constitution as if it somehow benefits their agenda.

Yes, the worship of the Constitution is a lot like the way people in feudalism worship the Bible. They’re secularized zealots, and that’s how Liberals and Conservatives tend to be. There’s this invocation of the Constitution, like it’s a sacrosanct text when it’s created for very specific economic interests, it’s for the preservation of slavery and land.

And of course, I know we changed the Constitution to prohibit slavery, but the land part is still there, and that’s why it was created to allow landowners to have as much land as they want, slave owners to have as much slaves as they want, and private business to be autonomous from the “tyranny of the government.”

Now let’s look at the Electoral College, the way political science professors who are conservative will describe it is, “it’s there to prevent tyranny.” Well, it’s designed to prevent, to quote James Madison, “the tyranny of the majority.” It’s a nice way of saying we don’t want the people to rule.

[00:46:03.370] – Grumbine

Exactly.

[00:46:04.810] – 1Dime

Because James Madison actually studied class struggle, and he kind of came to a similar conclusion as Marx, only in the opposite perspective, that “what if we allow too much democracy? People might vote for somebody who doesn’t support our interests.”

[00:46:19.280] – Grumbine

Can’t have that.

[00:46:20.680] – 1Dime

Yeah, exactly. So we should be looking at completely changing these institutions. Also the Supreme Court. Why does that exist? And more democracy? Why does the Senate exist, let alone fact is that Senate was created to emulate the House of Lords, but in a more “Democratic” way, which is by and large, not a Democratic institution.

We often perceive the decentralization that exists in the United States, which also exists in Canada, by the way, very similar to a centralized Federalist system. It’s created not in any way to add more democracy. It’s to prevent any sort of systemic change to the private property rights and unequal distribution of resources that exist.

So when we treat things as such, we realize that there’s a lot more than we can do. We can’t merely take over the state apparatus, get money out of politics, and just get the right people in office because they’ll still be stuck by these barriers of even winning in the first place, with the Electoral College as well as with passing laws.

They’ll face the Constitution and the Supreme Court, which should be abolished, and the Senate, which should be abolished. And this is what we need to understand when we talk about abolishing the Constitution. It’s not for some anarchy in response. I think we need a new Constitution. This should be common sense, right.

When Evo Morales took power in Bolivia, they didn’t try to work within the exact same state that the Spanish settlers created and that the American imperialists manipulated. They wanted to create a people’s Constitution with democratic input. And oh, Liberals hate this part. Liberals hate it when you change traditional institutions.

They’ll try to, invoke the words of tyranny and dictators, when you’ll have populist leaders or populist movements, try to change the old orders. But we need to look at who these orders are created for. And once we do that, we realize that our job as progressives, leftists, socialists is far greater than merely getting our policy program in place. To have that even happen, we need to change the institutions.

And before we get there, we also need to have the working class movements to get there. And then Bernie Sanders knew this very well because Bernie Sanders knew he wouldn’t be able to just get in office and pass his policies. He knew that there would need to be huge working class strikes, even that were threatening directly to the congressmen and senators like Mitch McConnell.

They would need to put a lot of pressure on these people to oust them out. We usually see in history, social democracy, is a better, safer alternative, less extreme than Marxism-Leninism. (By the way. I’m not a Marxist-Leninist, I’m Marxist.), but we see it as like a great alternative. Nordic countries. Everyone wants to be like Denmark. Sure. How did they get there?

These systems weren’t created by reformers, by social Democrats who just hopped in office and implemented their agenda. They’re created by much more radical militant labor movements; Marxists, anarchists, people like that who fought their way to get part of their agenda. The social Democratic welfare state compromise that was given in response was created to save the capitalist order, but the capitalist order would have never accepted such conditions if it weren’t for that pressure from people. Right?

So, once we understand the material conditions and power relations which I think Marxism can help us with, we get a clearer and more realistic and dialectical picture as to how to achieve the goals which many MMTers espouse.

[00:49:55.990] – Grumbine

Yes. It feels to me like the realm of imagination that neoliberalism has emblazoned upon our brains, makes that seem like it’s a radical thing, because I don’t think people realize where we are in the arc of revolution and the contradictions becoming so intense that revolution becomes inevitable. And I think that we’re sadly not near that yet.

I think that even though you have pockets of people that show up here and there. It doesn’t take long for them to dissipate. And that’s built into the system the way neoliberal precarity has tamed the working class, eliminating unions and any class awareness, and making us all rugged individualists, not because we want to be, but out of necessity to survive.

I don’t believe that the kind of change that we need is going to happen in the voting booth. I think we’re going to largely be fighting over one degree of separation between the Republicans and the Democrats, which are both, in my opinion, props in the theater.

[00:51:07.750] – 1Dime

America is a one party state, and in typical American fashion, they have two of them like they have with every product, Coke and Pepsi. You got to give that consumer choice.

[00:51:19.490] – Grumbine

Getting back to this, I don’t believe that we can have any kind of real meaningful revolution based on electoral politics, and that seems to be the go-to strategy for 99% of the people in this country. They don’t realize the system is baked to co opt them. What are your thoughts on electoral politics in the vein of Marx and understanding the MMT project?

[00:51:46.510] – 1Dime

I think a lot of the problems and misconceptions in the US left stem from the fact that people still believe that the US is a democracy, and I think that’s important to note because the United States is, in many ways, even less democratic than a lot of European countries, or even Canada, in the sense that you have a two party dictatorship, nobody outside of it is really allowed to participate; it has no capacity of winning, gets no media coverage.

I think we should look towards books like Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky as well as Inverted Totalitarianism by Shelton Wallan. I find the word Inverted totalitarianism to be an excellent way to describe the United States because it is, in many ways, a totalitarian country, but it doesn’t operate in the way that top down dictatorships like Nazi Germany operated.

It’s kind of in many ways a Liberal dictatorship. It’s a dictatorship in the sense that it’s a dictatorship of capitalism. You can’t change that. The ruling class are always in charge no matter who wins. But it’s Liberal in the sense that you can still criticize the government. You just can’t change the government. But if you actually try to make change, you’re either squashed like the Black Panthers, marginalized like Bernie, smeared in the media like Jeremy Corbyn in England.

So once we view America as what it is, not a democracy, you can strategize in a different way. And I think we shouldn’t take the opposite extreme and think revolution, Now. I’m not opposed to revolution based on any moral reasoning. I’m opposed to it on a strategic reason because I don’t think it works unless you have enough tacit consent from the public to hate the existing order.

[00:53:30.600] – Grumbine

I agree.

[00:53:31.070] – 1Dime

 If revolution happened now, it would probably be coming from the right, which is why I don’t support revolution right now in the United States. And also, when we talk about revolution, it can exist in many ways. I would consider neoliberalism as a political revolution. It was a zeitgeist of huge political changes that undid the welfare state. Bernie Sanders ran on the idea of a political revolution.

Political revolution doesn’t have to be violent. It’s only violent when the masses are forced to be violent, when democratic change is prohibited and prevented from happening. And another thing I like to look at is I think the United States left —when I say the left, I mean the social Democrats—I don’t consider people like Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden to be on the left.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie are the furthest right of the left, which is—I still like them—but left, and all the way to the anarchists, to the furthest left. So I think the way the left is now is very equivalent to where the political neoliberal right was in the 1930s. Why do I say that? Because we’re still in the midst of a Red Scare. We still are recovering from the Red Scare.

The left as we know it didn’t really exist in America, didn’t get reborn in America, until the 2008 crash, because people finally started to think maybe this capitalism thing isn’t so great, maybe there’s problems with it, and even more so with Covid. I’ve seen more people radicalized by Covid than I’ve ever seen in my entire life. People turning into Marxists, anarchists, left and right.

The thing is, though, we’re so plagued by a lot of the Cold War narratives that haunted us, the idea that socialism is fine because that’s what’s in Denmark and Sweden, and communism is bad because communism equals Stalinism. We’re taught these huge myths that we have to unlearn if we are to move forward. So I think the left is very young and right now there is two things: to bring more people to the left, to “spread the ideas.”

I think Stephanie Kelton is right and that we should not look towards persuading politicians, more to persuading people, changing the minds. That’s what the neoliberals did, because in the 1930s you couldn’t get elected with a neoliberal agenda. After the Great Depression, it was ridiculous. You were laughed at. Free markets? Are you kidding me? Seeing what happens.

So even it was the point where the Republicans adopted the welfare state model and took it even further with Dwight Eisenhower. So to get to the point where the neoliberals did, they had to do a lot of public relations, a fancy way of saying propaganda, spreading their ideas. They had to build institutions, build think tanks, organized institutions that spread ideas to the broad masses and through academia and through all these institutions, which the right wing always accuses us of doing.

By the way, they always think that there’s a huge leftist conspiracy through academia and the media. I wish that was the case, that’s what we should be doing. But we need to get enough of the public on our side. We will never get the majority of the people to be leftist because the majority of the people, I don’t think, any time in history, have been political.

I think political change is issued by a big minority. It’s a strong minority, and we need to have enough tacit consent. They might not know theory. They might not have the time to read theory and history, but they might know that, okay, capitalism is bad and socialism isn’t as bad as I thought. So you need enough people to be open to the idea, and you need to have a strong minority of people, leftists who are educated enough to not fall into the same mistakes that previous leftist did.

And that includes the social Democrats and the Marxist-Leninists, the Maoists, and the anarchists. I think there’s stuff to learn from past movements, and that’s what we should be doing. So this is how I see the current stage of the left now. And that’s mainly why I started my YouTube channel during Covid, is I thought I could try to start an organization of leftists and start strikes and stuff.

But what is that going to do at this stage? I feel like too many people I know have too much of a backward way of thinking. And I think the stuff that I do with my videos and what you do at Macro n Cheese and Real Progressives is trying to change the conversation. I think that’s one step of the way there.

[00:57:58.450] – Grumbine

I couldn’t agree more. Let’s see if there’s a good way of taking us out. I’ll leave you with the last word.

[00:58:05.650] – 1Dime

For those who just got into Modern Monetary Theory or who are experienced in it, I would encourage to look into Marxism as well, because Marxism, the way I like to think of it, is it understands the structural dynamics of power as to how we can get our idealist visions in place. You’ll see Marx when he writes, he rails on and on about idealism.

He opposes people who are utopian imaginaries, who have all these goals but have no way to achieve them. In many ways, he was the opposite of a utopian, contrary to what people portray him as. He’s a very pragmatic thinker. So I think it’s very useful for MMTers, MMT enthusiasts to read Marx to help strengthen their political projects, and vice versa for Marxists to learn Modern Monetary Theory so they don’t sound like Austrian libertarians when they talk about money.

And last thing is, I would say my videos tried, at least recently, to promote a synthesis of Marxism and Modern Monetary Theory in the sense that I apply them both to contemporary phenomenon, such as my two most recent videos, The Problem with Taxing the Rich and The Deficit Myth, The Biggest Lie in Politics. And I would encourage the more Marxist videos as well, such as Why Billionaires Prefer Democrats and The Burnout Society.

[00:59:22.810] – Grumbine

Very good. I want to thank you so much for joining me today, Tony. I love your channel. I’m glad to promote your channel. I hope folks check out your channel. You do a lot of really good work. How can folks find your YouTube channel?

[00:59:38.770] – 1Dime

So the channel is called 1Dime (the number one and D-I-M-E). You can watch my videos on company time and I have also a podcast called 1Dime radio that is associated with the channel that I run both on YouTube and Spotify as well as Patreon where people can find exclusive podcasts. I also am on Twitter at the Rap Nerd seven. I’m sure you can find all the links in the show notes or description. However, you’re watching this on Macro N Cheese.

[01:00:09.430] – Grumbine

Awesome. This is Steve Grumbine with my friend 1Dime saying goodbye from Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here.

[01:00:40.420] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.