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Re: What the cycles suggest
by Mike Alexander
19 August 2001 13:09 UTC
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[LP:]  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).
 
[Mike:]  It is my understanding that the longwave was noted as early as 1847 in an article in the British Railway Journal by Dr. Hyde Clark  [see Mager, Nathan H., The Kondratieff Wave, New York: Praeger, 1987].
 
[LP:] 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.
[Mike:] There is long wave theory and then there is the phenomenon itself.  The phenomenon had been observed many times before Kondratiev.  Kondratiev was the first (I believe) to really characterize it.  It is true that Kondratiev took a view that the waves reflected long term capital accumulation.  But this is not the only potential explanation.
 
[LP:]  Long waves should not be seen as "La Niņa" in other words.
 
How one views long waves will depend what theory is employed to look at them. As Joshua Goldstein points out in his excellent book on the topic, there is no paradigm for the study of longwaves, just various schools of thought.
Mike Alexander,  author of
Stock Cycles: Why stocks won't beat money markets over the next 20 years.
http://www.net-link.net/~malexan/STOCK_CYCLES.htm
 
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