• Monthly Review
  • Monthly Review Press
  • MR (Castilian)
  • Climate & Capitalism
  • Money on the Left
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
MR Online
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact/Submission
  • Browse
    • Recent Articles Archive
    • by Subject
      • Ecology
      • Education
      • Imperialism
      • Inequality
      • Labor
      • Literature
      • Marxism
      • Movements
      • Philosophy
      • Political Economy
    • by Region
      • Africa
      • Americas
      • Asia
      • Australasia
      • Europe
      • Global
      • Middle East
    • by Category
      • Art
      • Commentary
      • Interview
      • Letter
      • News
      • Newswire
  • Monthly Review Essays

About Michael Roberts

Michael Roberts is the creator and author of Michael Roberts Blog.
  • China-Africa friendship continues to flourish on vaccine, trade, renewable energy

    Xi’s third term – part one: growth, investment and consumption

    Originally published: The Next Recession on October 16, 2022 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    China’s Congress of the Communist Party takes place this week. 

  • Trickle down economics

    Trickle down economics

    Originally published: The Next Recession on September 30, 2022 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    The UK government’s economic policies under new PM Liz Truss have caused a stir among, not only leftists, but also among mainstream economists.

  • Human Development Index

    Life expectancy and human development in the 21st century

    Originally published: The Next Recession on September 11, 2022 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    Life expectancy is one of the best measures of human development. 

  • Oil and Gas Company

    Energy, cost of living and recession

    Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on September 4, 2022 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

    The G7 governments have a problem.

  • Ukraine Flag (Photo: Just Click's With A Camera)

    The invasion of capital

    Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on August 13, 2022 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

    Last week, Ukraine’s foreign private creditors agreed to the country’s request for a two-year freeze on payments on about $20bn of foreign debt.

  • dollars and euros

    Europe: caught in a trap

    Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on July 24, 2022 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

    The major economies are moving closer to recession, if they are not already there; and yet inflation rates continue to rise (for now). 

  • China’s Stock Market Value Hits Record High

    Is China headed for a crash?

    Originally published: The Next Recession on July 21, 2022 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    So, is this the moment of collapse in the Chinese model of development and the end of all that talk about ‘moving towards socialism’ etc? Many Western experts think so.

  • Automated Workers - Floating glass (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

    The Future of Work (Part 3) – automation

    Originally published: The Next Recession on July 4, 2022 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    In this third part of my series on the future of work, I want to deal with the impact of automation, in particular robots and artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs. I have covered this issue of the relationship between human labour and machines before, including robots and AI.  But is there anything new that we can find after the COVID slump?

  • Thousands of workers in this factory assembling and testing fiber optic systems. In many places of the Chinese economy, human labor replaces automation (in contrast to Japan, for example). (Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr)

    The Future of Work (Part 2) – working long and hard

    Originally published: The Next Recession on June 22, 2022 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    In the first post of my Future of Work series, I looked at the impact of working from home and remote work which has mushroomed since the COVID pandemic.

  • US workers quit

    The future of work 1 – remote working

    Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on June 7, 2022 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

    A few weeks ago, the world’s richest man Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, told his employees that they must return to the office or get out of the company.  Musk wrote in an email that everybody at Tesla must spend at least 40 hours a week in the office.

  • Wheat

    Food, famine and war

    Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on June 3, 2022 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

    If anything proves that famine and food insecurity are man-made rather than due to vagaries of nature and the weather, it is the current food crisis that is putting millions globally close to starvation.

  • Median Wage Company

    Inflation: wages versus profits

    Originally published: The Next Recession on May 9, 2022 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    Prices of commodities can be broken down into the three main components: labour costs (v= the value of labour power in Marxist terminology, non-labour inputs (c =the constant capital consumed, and the “mark-up” of profits over the first two components (s = surplus value appropriated by the capitalist owners). P = v + c + s.

  • Wealth 1

    The wealth of nations

    Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on February 23, 2022 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

    Marx’s first sentence in Capital Volume One is: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an “immense accumulation of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity.” (Moore and Aveling translation).

  • Graph 1

    World inequality

    Originally published: The Next Recession on December 8, 2021 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    The world has become more unequal in income and wealth in the last 40 years. That’s according to the World Inequality Report 2022.

  • Share of population living at below $5 a day

    Views on China

    Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on November 28, 2021 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

    What is the experience and future for China and its Communist party rule?  It seems appropriate to consider a number of new books on China that have been published that try to answer this question.

  • COP-out 26

    COP-out 26

    Originally published: System Change Not Climate Change on November 1, 2021 (more by System Change Not Climate Change)  |

    Marxist economist Michael Roberts shares his take on the Glasgow climate talks—what is on and what is not on the agenda.

  • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Logo.(Wikimedia Commons)

    Climate change: the fault of humanity?

    Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog on August 12, 2021 (more by Michael Roberts Blog)

    The sixth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) runs to nearly 4,000 pages. The IPCC has tried to summarise its report as the ‘final opportunity’ to avoid climate catastrophe.

  • Spending as % of GDP

    The year of the pandemic

    Originally published: The Next Recession on March 11, 2021 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    So maybe not just one year of the pandemic.

  • Abundent vaccine supply

    COVID vaccines: calling the shots

    Originally published: The Next Recession on November 25, 2020 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    Before the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the world, the big pharmaceutical companies did little investment in vaccines for global diseases and viruses.

  • COVID Infections/Deaths

    COVID 2021: More calamity ahead?

    Originally published: The Next Recession on November 15, 2020 (more by The Next Recession)  |

    The death rate from these new infections may be lower than in the first wave last March-April, but hospitalizations are reaching new peaks in the U.S. and parts of Europe.

  • 1
  • 2
Next →

Also By Michael Roberts in Monthly Review Magazine

  • Owning Financialization April 01, 2019

Monthly Review Essays

  • Extractivism in the Anthropocene
    John Bellamy Foster Dio Cramer

    Late Imperialism and the Expropriation of the Earth.

Lost & Found

  • End of Cold War Illusions
    Harry Magdoff F-16N Fighting Falcon

    In this reprint of the February 1994 “Notes from the Editors,” former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy ask: “The United States could not have won a more decisive victory in the Cold War. Why, then, does it continue to act as though the Cold War is still on?”

Trending

Popular (last 30 days)

RSS MR Press News

  • “Pathbreaking…an ideal teaching tool for college classes” (A Land With A People reviewed for ‘Socialism and Democracy’) January 23, 2023
  • “Suspense and dramatic interest” (Radek reviewed in ‘Socialism and Democracy’) January 23, 2023
  • Listen: Fascism is a “product” of monopoly finance capitalism (The Coming of the American Behemoth on the New Books Network) January 17, 2023
  • MacArthur’s myriad machinations to start World War III (Classic text, The Hidden History of the Korean War, reviewed for ‘Liberated Texts’) January 16, 2023
  • Send MR books to a library in Texas (‘Counterpunch’ lists Monthly Review’s editors on “Best of 2022” list) January 10, 2023

RSS Climate & Capitalism

  • Top 1% grab twice as much new wealth as everyone else combined January 16, 2023
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, January 2023 January 15, 2023
  • 90% of world’s people to face combined extreme heat and drought January 9, 2023
  • Practical nuclear fusion is still just hype January 2, 2023
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf: The Best of 2022 December 31, 2022

RSS Monthly Review

  • January 2023 (Volume 74, Number 8) January 1, 2023 The Editors
  • Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment Humanism: A Revolutionary Ecological Perspective January 1, 2023 John Bellamy Foster
  • NATO and the Long War on the Third World January 1, 2023 Paweł Wargan
  • Reflections on Lenin’s Dialectics January 1, 2023 Pyotr Kondrashov
  • The Witch-Hunting Committees: Never Again! January 1, 2023 Anne Braden

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Monthly Review Foundation
134 W 29TH ST STE 706
New York NY 10001-5304

Tel: 212-691-2555