Ep 386 - Who Do You Serve: Neoliberalism & Oligarchy Through an MMT Lens with Bill Mitchell

Modern Monetary Theory explains how sovereign currency systems work, but it doesn’t tell us who controls the state or whose interests state power serves. Economist Bill Mitchell suggests that a dialectical understanding of capitalism is essential for answering that question.He and Steve discuss MMT not as a policy prescription but as a lens to dissect the capitalist state, not a neutral arbiter but an instrument of class conflict. Bill traces the motion of capital from the post-WWII "Golden Age," which was a temporary compromise forced by a strong working class. He takes us through what he calls the neoliberal counter-revolution, epitomized by the Powell Memorandum, wherein capital consciously exercised control to reverse social gains and redistribute income upward.The government’s “fiscal crisis” is an ideological fiction (a fetish of money) that obscures the material reality: a currency-issuing government faces no inherent financial constraint, only real resource limits.From the erosion of labor power and the rise of think tanks to militarism, financialization, climate crisis, and AI-driven social control, Bill contends that today's crises are not policy mistakes but the logical outcomes of capitalism's extreme contradictions. The conversation explores why understanding monetary sovereignty is only the beginning, but reformism and electoralism are insufficient. The material conditions are driving toward a necessary rupture.William Mitchell is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE) at the University of Newcastle, NSW Australia. He is also the Docent Professor of Global Political Economy at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Guest International Professor at Kyoto University, Japan.He is one of the founders of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). His daily blog is one of the world’s leading economics blogs.Follow Bill’s work and find his books at https://billmitchell.org/blog/