Marx’s reproduction schema are to be found in Capital Volume Two Part 3 chapters 18 to 21. What are these reproduction schema? It is, as Marx put it, about: “the process of circulation (which in its entirety is a form of the process of reproduction) …. of aggregate social capital.” In other words, how capital (money and commodities) circulates at the macro level of an economy, in order to reproduce itself so that a new period of production and accumulation of capital can recommence.

Ashley Smith interviews Marxist economist Michael Roberts about the deeper reasons for capitalism’s contemporary malaise, the shape and contradictions of the recovery, and debates between Marxists and Keynesians about the ability of government spending to restore growth and profitability to capitalism.

For the past month and a half, Colombia has been gripped by social and political upheaval on a level unparalleled in the past half century. On 28 April, a national strike began that surged across the roads and avenues of more than 600 cities around the country, an unexpected but welcome surprise for the leaders of the strike committee and one that caught the national government entirely unprepared for the scale of the strike and its enormous popular support.