[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.