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 the mechanism he takes from the third volume of Marx's Capital: capitalists invest only when it is profitable, and competition drives them to invest ever more in machinery relative to labor, which Roberts argues pulls the rate of profit down over time, held back for a while by counteracting tendencies. The same pattern, on his account, ran beneath the stock-market boom of the late 1920s and the slump of the 1930s, which ended only with the war economy. The episode closes on the rival crisis theories Roberts contests — policy error, unregulated finance, underconsumption, and overproduction — and on his case for profitability as the underlying driver of booms and slumps alike.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
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.
KEY TOPICS COVERED
– The 1870s depression debate: the Austrian-school claim that no depression occurred, the gold-standard explanation, and Roberts's reply from the British data
– Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and Roberts's case that falling profits drive falling investment — the direction of causation he defends against critics
– The organic composition of capital, and Roberts's argument that value comes from human labor, with machines helping labor produce more of it
– Counteracting tendencies — longer hours, more intense work, cheaper machinery, foreign trade and investment — and the up-waves and down-waves of profitability from 1850 to the early 1980s
– 1929 and the 1930s: falling profitability beneath a stock-market boom, and the war economy that ended the slump
– The rival crisis theories Roberts contests — policy error, unregulated finance, underconsumption, and overproduction — including Engels's reply to underconsumption
CHAPTERS
(Note: chapter list below is intentionally plain — no dashes, bullets, or characters before the timestamp. YouTube's parser only recognizes a chapter line if the timestamp is the very first thing on the line.)
00:00 Profit Drives Capitalism
01:41 Setting Up Three Crises
02:38 1873 Depression Debates
05:22 Profitability Causes Slumps
07:22 Marx's Law Explained
09:56 Organic Composition Basics
13:13 Counteracting Tendencies
15:07 Profit Waves Through History
18:32 From 1929 to War Economy
23:58 Competing Crisis Theories
28:06 Why Profit Matters Most
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ABOUT NOTIONS OF PROGRESS
Notions of Progress is a podcast tracing ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of artificial intelligence. Hosted by Marshall Madow — an independent researcher whose MA in History (Cambridge) examined Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth, and whose MSc (Oxford, Saïd Business School) focused on Complexity Science and Leadership — the show surfaces the debates rather than settling them, tracing how thinkers from Hesiod to Hayek, Plato to Peter Haff, have understood what it means for humanity to move forward, at what cost, and for whom.
TRANSCRIPT
Full transcript available at notionsofprogress.com
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