Michael Roberts: The Meat & Potatoes of Marxism (Free eBook)

There is the dandy Marxism of Walter Benjamin, the urban Marxism of David Harvey, and the philosophical Marxism of Antonio Negri. But now and then it's good to digest the meat-and-potatoes Marxism of Michael Roberts. His thing? It all comes down to the profit cycle.

Michael Roberts new and ground-breaking book is available in full online. Roberts is an economist who has worked in the City of London for 30 years. He predicted the Great Recession several years before it happened and in this book he explains why the Great Recession happened, based on Marxist analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism.

Roberts offers an original analysis of the capitalist economic system based on the conjunction of various cycles of motion in construction, manufacturing and financal markets, but with Marx's profitability cycle as the driver of all.

The book and blog are worth the time. They make clear the sources of the current recession and the coming depression.

And what exactly is a depression or recession? It's nothing more than a strike of the rich. When the rich don't get what they want from the economy (big profits), they simply go on strike. The net effect? The economy crashes. The recession has nothing do with you or me. Our strikes cannot bring an entire system down to its knees. Without considerable structural changes, we will always live in fear of the next strike of the rich.

Reblogged via: Charles Mudede @ SLOG