A Marxist in the City of London: Michael Roberts on The Long Depression
"It's both, isn't it?" That's how Michael Roberts answers when asked whether working inside the machine he critiques created a conflict for him. Roberts spent three decades advising banks and hedge funds on currency trades — the City of London's daily business of moving money to make money — while considering himself a Marxist since his university years in the late 1960s. He doesn't resolve the tension so much as use it: watching finance capital operate from the inside, he argues, gave him a clearer read on "the trends and processes going on in capitalism" than most academic economists get. That vantage feeds directly into his central claim about 2008 — that the crash wasn't an ordinary recession, but the opening of a structural depression driven by capitalism's own tendency toward falling profitability.
Overview
In the first of a three-part conversation, Marxist economist Michael Roberts joins Notions of Progress to lay out the argument of his 2016 book The Long Depression: that the 2008 crash was not an ordinary recession, but the opening of a longer structural depression driven by capitalism's tendency toward falling profitability. Before reaching that argument, Roberts traces his path from student Marxism to a thirty-year career as a City of London economist, then lays out the materialist conception of history underlying his economics — and closes on the definition of "depression" that Parts Two and Three will test against the record.
Key Moments from the Conversation
A Marxist Inside the City of London
Roberts became a Marxist as a university student in the late 1960s, encountering the materialist conception of history in books whose authors, he later realized, were Marxists. He then spent three decades advising major banks and hedge funds — work he frames not as a contradiction but an advantage: watching finance capital operate from the inside, he argues, gave him a sharper read on capitalism's trends than economists confined to the academy typically get. "I'm trying to deal with things that affect us now," he says of his approach, "not some great long screed of Marxist theory."
The Materialist Conception of History
Roberts lays out the framework underneath his economics: that social change isn't driven primarily by political leadership or by ideas taken on their own, but by a society's economic foundations — who owns and controls production, and what forms of inequality that ownership generates. On his account, capitalism is genuinely progressive, raising productivity and living standards, and at the same time structurally exploitative, since investment decisions rest with a very small ownership class rather than with the people those decisions affect.
What Makes a Depression, Not Just a Recession
Pressed to define his terms, Roberts draws a precise line: an ordinary recession recovers to its prior growth trend; a depression doesn't. The 2008 crash, on his account, behaved like the slumps of the 1870s and the 1930s — production and employment fell, then recovered, but never returned to the trend they had been on before. That gap, sustained for over a decade, is what makes the years since 2008 a long depression rather than a passing downturn — the claim Parts Two and Three of this conversation go on to test against the historical record.
Guest Spotlight
Michael Roberts worked in the City of London as an economist for over 30 years before retiring. He is the author of several books: The Great Recession: A Marxist View (2009); The Long Depression (2016), the book at the center of this conversation; World in Crisis (joint editor, 2018); Marx 200: His Economics (2018); and Engels 200: His Economics (2020). With Guglielmo Carchedi ⛑ name pending verification, he co-authored Capitalism in the 21st Century (2023). His new book, Time Is Running Out: The World Economy in the 2020s and Beyond, is forthcoming in December 2026. He writes regularly at thenextrecession.wordpress.com.
For Further Reading
Primary Source
Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (2016) — the book at the center of this conversation.
Questions to Consider
If capitalism’s productivity gains and its structural inequality trace to the same cause — private control of investment — can one be credited as progress without crediting the other as its condition?
By Roberts’s own test, a depression ends only when growth returns to its prior trend. What would count as evidence that it has?
Does observing capitalism from inside its own institutions sharpen a critique of it, or only sharpen the description?
Connection to Notions of Progress
Roberts's account puts a specific mechanism behind a question this series returns to often: whether progress and its costs can be pulled apart, or whether they share a single cause. His claim is that capitalism's productivity gains and its structural exploitation come from the same source — private control over investment decisions — so that measuring progress by output alone misses half of what that same system produces. Where the argument goes next, in Parts Two and Three, is whether that mechanism actually explains the specific slumps of the 1870s and the 1930s, or only resembles them.
Listen & Subscribe
Website — notionsofprogress.com
Email: marshall@notionsofprogress.com
Nothing About This Is Inevitable: Gavin Mueller on Automation, AI, and a Different Future
