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WMGs Weapons of Mass Growth will never be found

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the apparent economic recovery in the United States during 2003 was not a genuine revival of productive capitalism but an artificial, credit-fuelled bubble that could not be sustained. Michael Roberts argues that the "weapons of mass growth" — the real investment, employment, and productive expansion that would justify the optimism of political and financial elites — simply do not exist. The recovery was built on three unsustainable pillars: historically low interest rates that inflated household debt and a housing bubble; tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the rich while offering crumbs to the majority; and a deliberately weakened dollar that exported the costs of US adjustment to Europe and Japan. By early 2004, each of these props was reaching its limit, and the underlying weakness of real production, stagnant wages, and falling employment meant the recovery would prove ephemeral.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is grounded in the Marxist critique of fictitious capital and the distinction between the sphere of circulation and the sphere of production. Roberts draws on Marx's understanding that credit expansion and financial speculation can temporarily mask the contradictions of accumulation, but cannot resolve them. The article identifies a classic pattern: a fall in the rate of profit in the late 1990s (profits in 2003 were still below their 1997 peak), followed by a period in which the state and financial system attempt to revive accumulation through monetary stimulus and fiscal transfers to capital. The result is not a restoration of healthy accumulation but a shift of crisis tendencies into the sphere of debt — household, corporate, and sovereign. The argument also implicitly draws on the Marxist theory of imperialism, showing how the US uses its control over the global reserve currency to shift the costs of its internal contradictions onto rival capitalist powers, while simultaneously pursuing military adventures that drain rather than strengthen the economy.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article is written at a specific conjuncture: early 2004, with the US economy having just posted an annualised 8% growth figure for the third quarter of 2003, stock markets recovering sharply from the 2000-2002 crash, and the political establishment — Bush, Blair, Schröder, Greenspan — declaring the crisis over. Roberts identifies several concrete indicators that contradict this narrative:

  • US employment grew by only 1,000 in December 2003, against the 250,000 per month needed to sustain recovery forecasts.
  • Manufacturing wages were stagnant; companies were cutting pension and health benefits.
  • Household debt had reached unprecedented levels, with borrowing used for consumption rather than productive investment.
  • The US budget deficit exceeded 5% of GDP, and the trade deficit was at a similar record level.
  • The dollar had fallen nearly 30% against the euro in 2003, squeezing European and Japanese exporters and suppressing their growth.
  • The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were generating massive ongoing costs with no exit strategy.

The article also connects the economic conjuncture to geopolitics: the US was using protectionist measures (steel tariffs, quotas on Chinese textiles) and currency devaluation to manage its contradictions, at the cost of straining relations with its trading partners.

Where the Argument Continues

This article is an early statement of themes that Roberts would develop extensively over the following two decades. The analysis of a credit-fuelled, debt-dependent recovery that cannot restore genuine accumulation is a precursor to his later work on the 2008 financial crisis, the Great Recession, and the long downturn. The concept of "weapons of mass growth" — the ironic inversion of the WMD pretext for the Iraq War — is a rhetorical device that recurs in his writing when identifying false promises of recovery. Readers should follow the trajectory through Roberts' subsequent articles on marxist.com, particularly his annual world economy surveys and his analyses of the 2007-2008 crash. The argument also connects to the broader Marxist debate on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which Roberts has developed at length in his books The Great Recession (2009) and The Long Depression (2016). The critique of the US dollar's role in managing imperialist contradictions is taken up in later articles on currency wars and the challenge to dollar hegemony.

Connections

  • Marx, Karl — Capital, Volume III, on credit, fictitious capital, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
  • Roberts, Michael — The Great Recession (2009) and The Long Depression (2016), which develop the theoretical framework applied here.
  • In Defence of Marxism — The annual world economy surveys and articles on the 2008 crash, the eurozone crisis, and the COVID-19 recession.
  • Against the Stream — Episodes on the long downturn and the limits of monetary policy.
  • Related articles on marxist.com — Roberts' earlier piece "World economy 2003: hope and reality" (December 2002), cited in the text, and his later analyses of the housing bubble and subprime crisis.

Key Quotes

  1. "The reality is that US growth in 2003 was artificially created and will prove to be ephemeral in 2004. It was bumped up by a massive injection of paper money into the economy by the Federal Reserve Bank."

  2. "All this spending was not backed up by any real increases in the production of factories in the US or in the income of workers in them. Indeed, manufacturing wages hardly increased during 2003 for the average worker."

  3. "The economic recovery of 2003 was based on cheap money and tax cuts. But interest rates cannot be cut any more and the effect of the tax cuts is waning."

  4. "The US has financed its growth by printing dollars and lowering the value of the greenback — all at the expense of European and Japanese exporting companies."

  5. "So in 2004, the WMG must be found in order to ensure genuine economic growth. That means companies must invest more and they must start employing more workers to boost real production."

  6. "It is estimated that for the growth forecasts of Bush, Greenspan and Co to be met in 2004, there must be at least an increase of 250,000 jobs every month for the next year. Well it was 1,000 in December."