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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

So maybe not just one year of the pandemic.

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

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.

According to the IMF, about half of Low Income Economies (LIEs) are now in danger of debt default.  ‘Emerging market’ debt to GDP has increased from 40% to 60% in this crisis.

Global emissions fell by 8.8 per cent in the first half of this year amid restrictions on movement and economic activity owing to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report.

Sweden has a relatively low level of urbanisation, is away from continental Europe and has a population prepared to apply social distancing with some discipline, the cumulative COVID death rate in Sweden is not far short of Italy and Spain, and is way higher than its Nordic neighbours, Denmark, Finland and Norway, which did impose early and much stricter lockdowns.

In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Michael Heinrich’s article is really a continuation of the argument by Monthly Review that Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (LTRPF) is not the main cause of economic crises.… Heinrich makes the following points: 1) Marx’s law is indeterminate; 2) it is empirically unproven and even unjustifiable on any measure of verification; 3) Engels edited Marx’s works badly, distorting his views about the law in Capital Vol. 3; 4) Marx himself, in writings during the 1870s, began to have doubts about the law as the cause of crises and started to abandon it in favour of some theory that took into account credit, interest rates and the problem of realisation (similar to Keynesian theory); 5) Marx died before he could present these revisions of his crisis theory, so there is no coherent Marxist theory of crisis.