Unfair society, unhealthy lives

Coming on hard behind the recent UK report on inequality of income and wealth in the UK (see my blog, Inequality in Britain, 28 January 2010) is a new report on the health of Britons (or the English, to be more exact).  Commissioned by the UK government , chaired Sir Michael Marmot, Professor of Public

Profit cycles – do they exist?

Nobody agrees with me, whether they are Marxist or non-Marxist economists, but I reckon that profitability of capitalism moves in cycles.  The profit cycle is about 32-36 years, with an up phase of 16-18 years followed by a down phase of similar length. In my book, The Great Recession, (Lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-great-recession/6079458 or at Amazon, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Recession-Michael-Roberts)

US unemployment (17% without work)

The latest figures for US employment came out on Friday.  January’s data showed that the US economy is still shedding jobs.  Indeed, from the start of the recession until March 2009, the US economy lost 8.4m workers (this figure was just revised up over a million).  And of course, there is probably another 1m further

Greek countdown

Who is paying for capitalism’s worst financial crisis and slump since the Great Depression?  As Marxists could easily predict – it won’t be the top 1% of income earners and owners of capital.  No, it will be ordinary working people and their families, who are in no way responsible for the trillions on investment value

Overproduction and capitalist crisis

I have recently had a few emails that have asked me whether the Great Recession that we have just been through (and previous economic recessions) was caused by overproduction or by the falling rate of profit.  It would be churlish for me to answer by saying: read my book!  After all, that is what a

Inequality in Britain

It is truly shocking.  The just published report of UK’s National Equality Panel, called An anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, could not be more devastating as an indictment of the inequalities bred by the capitalist system.  The report shows what Marxists already know: that the capitalist system of production enables a very small

Britain: recession and recovery

In the Great Recession of 2008-9, Britain did not suffer the deepest slump of the top seven capitalist economies in the world.  In the UK, real national output fell 6% from its peak in Q108 to its low in Q309. Output fell more in the big manufacturing and exporting economies of Germany and Japan.  But

The mass of profits and economic crisis

In my book, The Great Recession (see chapter 24 and appendix B) available from Lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-great-recession/6079458, I argue that the best short-term indicator of an oncoming capitalist slump or economic recession is the movement of profits – in particular, the total mass of profit. According to Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of

Business as usual

John Mack (Morgan Stanley), Brian Moynihan ( Bank of America), Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan), and Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs) – these masters of the financial universe paraded before the US Congress yesterday to explain why their banks managed to bring world financial system to its knees and cause the worst slump in capitalist production since

The stock market cycle – still in a bear market

In my book, The Great Recession, there is a chapter on stock market cycles.  I show that the movement in the value of stocks and shares is closely correlated with the movement in the profitability of capitalist production. Indeed, there is a cyclical movement in stock market prices with an up phase (called the bull