Historian and journalist Vijay Prashad talks with Steve about why Antonio Gramsci still matters.

Listeners to this podcast know that we have a pretty good grasp of the monetary system. But we’re constantly working to expand our understanding of the systemic underpinnings of real power. How else will we be able to seize it? For help, we turn to Gramsci.

According to Vijay, Gramsci was doing class forensics. His core puzzle was brutal and practical: why did big chunks of Italy’s working-class bail on their own unions and parties and drift into fascism? That’s the real origin story of “cultural hegemony,” “common sense,” and the whole Gramscian toolbox: figuring out how consent gets manufactured and how counterrevolution recruits.

Vijay takes us through Gramsci’s political development and his imprisonment under Mussolini, where he wrote his seminal Prison Notebooks.

Then they get into Gramsci’s key concepts: hegemony (borrowed from Lenin and, per Vijay, more than a “culture theory”), the necessity of a Leninist-type party as the modern Prince, and the need to build alliances to create working-class leadership over society.

After taking a hard look at the left in the US, Steve and Vijay discuss the limits of electoral politics and the missing infrastructure for a serious battle of ideas. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about class power, organizing, and what it actually takes to change how people understand the world they’re living in.

Vijay Prashad is the Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a historian, journalist, and author of forty books, including Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassination; Red Star over the Third World; and The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.

thetricontinental.org

@vijayprashad on X

In today’s world, anyone serious about anti-imperialism, global development, and monetary sovereignty needs to break through the well-funded US propaganda machine and develop a fact-based, nuanced understanding of China.

To this end, Steve asked Yan Liang to come back to the podcast to look at China through the MMT lens, analyzing its economic management, global role, and response to Western villainization. They discuss China’s development ethos and describe China as a state that actively uses its monetary and fiscal sovereignty to guide development towards internal goals (poverty alleviation, technological self-reliance, common prosperity) and external partnership (Win-win cooperation, Belt and Road Initiative).

Illustrating the difference between state steering and the so-called “free market,” the conversation goes into China’s mobilization of real resources through strategic state guidance, like Five-Year Plans and state-owned enterprises in key sectors.

Yan talks about the use of capital controls and a managed exchange rate. She details lessons from 2015 and the application of MMT principles to insulate domestic policy from volatile external forces.

Without romanticizing China, Yan also walks through its real challenges. But from an MMT-aware lens, these are seen as problems of policy design and resource use (issues a sovereign, planning-oriented state can address!) rather than proof of an impending collapse.

Yan Liang is Peter C and Bonnie S Kremer Chair Professor of Economics at Willamette University. She is also a Research Associate at the Levy Economics Institute, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Global Development Policy Center (Boston University), and a Research Scholar of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.

Yan specializes in the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the Political Economy of China, Economic Development, and International Economics. Yan’s current research focuses on China’s development finance and industrial transformation, and China’s role in the global financial architecture.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yan-liang-1355b91a2/

@YanLian31677392 on X

Steve and his guest, Scottish political economist William Thomson, use the fight over Scotland’s independence to dissect how class power hides inside “neutral” economic rules.

Will, founder of SCOTONOMICS, talks about his journey from neoclassical training to a heterodox, political-economy perspective grounded in MMT, ecological economics, and class analysis.

He recently wrote a paper (with friend-of-the-podcast Dirk Ehnts) showing how the Scottish government’s plan to copy the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact and delay its own currency would lock an “independent” Scotland into permanent austerity and dependence on markets and foreign owners.

Will explains that more foreign direct investment, supply-side reforms, and 3% deficit caps aren’t “responsible” policy – they are mechanisms to protect external and domestic elites at the expense of workers and communities.

Steve and Will stress that MMT is just a lens without an explicit socialist or working-class political economy. The same monetary tools can be used for empire, war, and repression. They argue for an independence project built on monetary sovereignty, full employment, ecological limits, and economic resilience... not on appeasing markets and Brussels.

William Thompson is a Scottish political economist and founder of SCOTONOMICS. He worked for almost a decade in the financial services sector in London. He has an MSc in the Green Economy and MEcon in the Economics of Sustainability. Based in Dunblane, Will writes regular blog posts and articles on economics in various publications including The National newspaper in Scotland and the Scottish Left Review. Support SCOTONOMICS: patreon.com/Scotonomics.

@Williamgallus on X

https://scotonomics.org/