Re: What the cycles suggest

On Sat, 18 Aug 2001 12:53:54 -0400, Mike Alexander wrote:
>The American historian Arthur Schlesinger
>identified a series of  liberal-conservative
>political cycles back in the 1940's.  His cycles
>agree  pretty well with the figure.  Schlesinger
>identified a liberal wave from  1901-1919 (the
>figure shows 1896-1916), a conservative wave
>from 1919 to 1931  (the figure shows 1916-1931)
>and a liberal wave from 1931 to 1947 (the figure
>shows 1931-1946).  Since Schlesinger's time we
>have seen a conservative  wave from 1946 to
>1963, a liberal wave to 1980 and a conservative
>wave since  then.

I don't want to discourage anybody from taking a panoramic view of 
history, but we mustn't lose track of the fact that "long waves" were 
first identified by a Russian Marxist named Alexander Helphand 
(Parvus). Mandel notes in "Late Capitalism" that "Through a study of 
agricultural crises he came to the conclusion, in the mid-1890s, that 
the long depression which began in 1873 and to which Friedrich Engels 
had attached such great importance ought soon to be replaced by a 
long-term upswing."

What somehow seems to get lost in much of the World Systems 
appropriation of long wave theory is the original anchor in Marxist 
value theory. Parvus, Kondratieff, Mandel, Anwar Shaikh all view long 
waves against the backdrop of value theory. In other words they see 
it as kind of perspective on long term capital accumulation, but the 
minute it becomes detached from this it starts to look much more like 
a kind of Spenglerian view of history.

You can see this in Frank's "Re-Orient", which despite its powerful 
refutation of Eurocentrism, essentially sees a possible rise of the 
East as a kind of long wave development that fits into an almost 
eternal world-systems version of bad karma.

For Marxists, the subjective factor also becomes key. Instead of 
passively observing the rise and fall of vast political-economic 
edifices within capitalism, we seek ways to throw a monkey wrench 
into history and allow human beings to make their own fate. Long 
waves should not be seen as "La Niņa" in other words.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 08/18/2001

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