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Capitalism Unleashed – Finance, Globalisation and Welfare

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

Michael Roberts argues that Andrew Glyn's Capitalism Unleashed provides a useful descriptive history of capitalism's recovery from the 1970s crisis but fundamentally fails as a Marxist analysis because it lacks a coherent theory of capitalist crisis. Glyn documents how capitalism was "unleashed" through the crushing of organised labour, privatisation, financialisation, and globalisation, yet cannot explain why this unleashed capitalism failed to match the growth rates of the post-war Golden Age. Roberts contends that Glyn's earlier work with Bob Sutcliffe on the "profits squeeze" was already theoretically flawed, substituting a wage-push explanation for Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The book's inability to project where capitalism is heading stems from this theoretical weakness: without a law of profitability, Glyn can only gesture at vague future risks rather than identify the internal contradictions that will drive the next crisis.

Theoretical Grounding

Roberts positions himself firmly within the Marxist tradition that treats Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (LTRPF) as the central organising principle for understanding capitalist crisis. He distinguishes this from the "profits squeeze" school associated with Glyn and Sutcliffe, which explains falling profitability through rising wage shares under conditions of full employment and international competition. For Roberts, the squeeze thesis mistakes a conjunctural phenomenon for the underlying law of motion: falling profitability is not primarily a distributional outcome of working-class strength but a structural feature of capitalist accumulation itself, driven by rising organic composition of capital.

The review also implicitly draws on the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, and between productive accumulation and fictitious capital, though these are not elaborated. Roberts's critique of Glyn's agnosticism about the future reflects a broader Marxist insistence that capitalism's laws of motion permit definite predictions about crisis tendencies, even if their precise timing and form remain contingent.

Conjunctural Relevance

Written in January 2007, this review is prescient in ways the author could not have fully anticipated. Roberts identifies precisely the theoretical gap that would be exposed within eighteen months by the global financial crisis of 2008. Glyn's claim that "performance over recent decades is within the 'normal' range" and that there is "no compelling evidence" of decisive change represented the dominant centre-left Keynesian complacency of the mid-2000s. Roberts's insistence that falling profitability would "turn capitalism back into crisis" reads today as a direct challenge to the Great Moderation consensus.

The review also captures a specific conjuncture: the post-dot-com recovery, the housing bubble, the integration of China and India into global capitalism, and the apparent stabilisation of class relations after the defeats of the 1980s. Roberts notes that Glyn's book cannot explain why growth remained slower than the Golden Age despite capital's victory over labour — a puzzle that Marxists explain through the secular decline in the rate of profit, which even a successful assault on wages cannot permanently reverse.

Where the Argument Continues

This review is an early statement of themes Michael Roberts would develop systematically in his later work, particularly The Great Recession: A Marxist View (2009) and his ongoing blog The Next Recession. The argument that the 1982–2007 period represented a profitability-led recovery that would exhaust itself became the basis for Roberts's analysis of the 2008 crisis and the subsequent long depression.

Within the In Defence of Marxism corpus, the theoretical framework here connects to numerous articles on the LTRPF, the nature of the 2008 crisis, and critiques of Keynesian and social-democratic strategies. The review also implicitly opens a debate about the relationship between Marxist crisis theory and empirical measurement of profitability — a question Roberts has pursued in depth, including his work with the International Working Group on Value Theory.

Connections

  • Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe, British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze (1973) — the earlier work Roberts critiques as theoretically flawed but analytically serious.
  • Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed (2006) — the book under review.
  • Marx, Capital Volume III, Part III — the theoretical foundation for the LTRPF.
  • Michael Roberts, The Great Recession (2009) — the developed application of the framework previewed here.
  • The work of the International Working Group on Value Theory (IWGVT) — empirical research on profitability trends that Roberts has been central to.
  • Against the Stream episodes on crisis theory and the 2008 crash — where the conjunctural analysis is extended.

Key Quotes

  1. "Glyn and Sutcliffe's profitability thesis was not Marx's, however, but one that relied primarily on the argument that full employment in the late 1960s meant that workers could organise to raise wage levels, while international competition did not allow capitalists to raise prices to compensate."

  2. "Capitalism had been unleashed, but it had not proved more dynamic. 'Output per head has been growing more slowly since 1990 than it did in the turbulent period of 1973-9, never mind the Golden Age' (p151)."

  3. "Because there is no analysis of why capitalism managed to turn things round and begin a period of rising profitability and success (in capitalist terms) after the crisis period of the 1970s, there is no insight on where capitalism is going now."

  4. "In my view, the last 25 years of capitalist success has been based on a recovery in profitability for the very reasons that Marx explained could happen. However, the next couple of decades will see a reversal of that process because Marx's most important law of the motion of capitalism will exert itself."

  5. "These are worthy objectives, but how can they be possible if an unleashed capitalism shows little real sign of weakening? As such, this last chapter of policy aims is no substitute or compensation for the lack of a convincing theory or analysis of why, how or when capitalism might yet falter."