Episodes

In this second of a three-part conversation, Marxist economist Michael Roberts takes the central claim from Part One — that the 2008 crash opened a long depression — back to the two historical cases on which his 2016 book The Long Depression rests. He begins with the 1870s, answering the Austrian-school argument that no depression took place and a rival monetary explanation tied to the gold standard; his reply draws on the data for Britain, the hegemonic economy of the period. He then sets out t...

In this first of a three-part conversation, Marxist economist Michael Roberts joins Notions of Progress to lay out the central argument of his 2016 book The Long Depression: that the 2008 financial crash was not an ordinary recession, but the opening of a longer structural depression driven by capitalism’s own tendency toward falling profitability. Before getting there, Roberts traces his own path — from a Marxist conversion as a student to a three-decade career as an economist inside the City o...

This episode closes out a three-part conversation with Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work. In Part 2, Mueller traced Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery through the split between orthodox and heterodox Marxism, Frederick Taylor's theory of workplace control, the Technocracy Movement, and Norbert Wiener's early warnings to organized labor about automation. In this final part, Mueller brings that history into the present. The conversation moves from Shos...

In Episode 17, Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam) traced the Luddites back to the guild economy of England's Midlands. In this second installment of a three-part conversation, Mueller follows that struggle into the twentieth century: Karl Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery, and the split between Karl Kautsky's “orthodox” Marxism — which treated capitalist technology as a scientifically inevitable path to socialism — and the workers' movements that resisted that framing directly on the ...

They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer — but historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were doing “collective bargaining by riot.” In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work, walks through who the Luddites actually were: skilled textile workers in England's Midlands, organized under the mythical banner of King Ludd, fighting to preserve their wages, their working conditions, and the quality of t...

They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer — but historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were doing “collective bargaining by riot.” In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work, walks through who the Luddites actually were: skilled textile workers in England's Midlands, organized under the mythical banner of King Ludd, fighting to preserve their wages, their working conditions, and the quality of t...