Is Capitalism Past Its Use-By Date? Michael Roberts on Three Futures
Michael Roberts allows that capitalism may be entering a period of rising profitability, with AI among the possible sources, and still holds that the system cannot continue as it is. In Part Three he sets both claims side by side. Asked whether higher profits would signal progress, and for whom, he answers that more investment could bring more jobs and better wages in some sectors, and that this could strengthen the working class. He says capitalism could have another burst of expansion lasting perhaps 15 or 20 years, and he names working people as the other side of the use-by date: an alternative that, he adds, nothing guarantees. In Roberts’s account, a renewed expansion and the case for replacing the system can both hold.
Overview
In Part Three of a three-part conversation, Michael Roberts carries the argument of Part Two, that falling profitability drives slumps, from the 1870s and 1930s into the present. He describes a generation worse off than its parents and the postwar golden age as the exception, considers whether AI could raise profitability for a time, and answers Robert J. Gordon on stagnation and Thomas Piketty on taxing billionaires. The conversation closes on three futures: a renewed expansion, a longer stagnation, or, if working people cannot change the system, fascist and military regimes and what Roberts calls barbarism.
Key Moments from the Conversation
A Generation Worse Off
Roberts says that after the Second World War young people did better than their parents, and that since 2008 the pattern has reversed. He calls twenty years of depression a generation, and points to Generation X and the millennials, who in his account will not match the living standards or housing of his own generation. He presents the golden age as the exception: capitalism could make concessions, such as universal healthcare in Britain since 1948, because profitability was high. With profitability lower, he says, the period from the 1980s brought counter-reforms to wages, union rights, state ownership, and welfare.
Profit, AI, and a Possible Slump
Roberts says he is coming to the view that the depressionary period that began in 2008 may be ending. The pandemic slump and new technologies such as AI, he says, could create conditions for a new level of profitability in some sectors, particularly in the United States, and he describes the present as an inflationary period. He adds that the law of profitability he draws from Marx’s Capital remains in place: if too much is invested in machines and AI relative to labor, profitability would fall again, and a serious slump could follow in the 2030s or a little later.
Barbarism and the Fall of Rome
Roberts sets out three futures: a renewed expansion; a longer stagnation of the kind he attributes to Robert J. Gordon; and, if workers do not gain control of the economy, fascist and military regimes. He explains the word barbarism through Rome. Writers after that period, he says, described a civilization of aqueducts and production that collapsed over a long time; from about 400 AD roads and buildings deteriorated, small farming communities could not maintain the system, and people were reduced to subsistence. He warns of a similar descent if working people cannot change the system in a further crisis.
Guest Spotlight
Michael Roberts worked in the City of London as an economist for more than thirty years before retiring. He is the author of The Great Recession: A Marxist View (2009) and The Long Depression (2016), the book at the center of this conversation; joint editor of The World in Crisis (2018); author of Marx 200: His Economics (2018) and Engels 200: His Economics (2020); and, with Guglielmo Carchedi, Capitalism in the 21st Century (2023). His next book, Time Is Running Out: The World Economy in the 2020s, is expected in December 2026. He writes regularly at thenextrecession.wordpress.com.
For Further Reading
Primary Sources
Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (2016) — the book at the center of this conversation, in which Roberts says he shows the fall in profitability across the major economies in a graph.
Michael Roberts, Time Is Running Out: The World Economy in the 2020s (forthcoming, December 2026) — the book in which Roberts says he raises the possibility of a renewed period of expansion.
Questions to Consider
Connection to Notions of Progress
In Part Three Roberts says capitalism has a certain vitality and has taken things forward, and he sets that beside grotesque inequality, a generation he describes as worse off than its parents, and a possible descent he calls barbarism. He presents the postwar golden age as a period when high profitability allowed concessions to workers. For a series that asks what drives progress and what reverses it, this places advance and decline within one account. Piketty and Gordon, as Roberts reports their views, read the present differently, and the question of which reading holds stays open.
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Is Capitalism Past Its Use-By Date? Michael Roberts on Three Futures
