On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote: > If Great Britain had resisted the Monroe > Doctrine, would there have been a "long wave" or would the US economy have > stagnated? Perhaps the long waves are nothing but a barometer of the > imperialist lurches forward of the Yankee republic. I always thought of long-wave theory as the diachronic or long-term version of the whole Marxian mode-of-production debate; it needs the corrective of short-term analyses, focused on specific periods, for the thing to say anything meaningful. Otherwise, long-wave theory ends up being a recycled "great nations" theory, about how specific countries rise to hegemony, or stumble to ignominious defeat. I'm not sure if Shaikh is correct, though, about dating the turning of the crisis in the early Eighties -- it's true that in the mid-Eighties everything changed, the US became a major debtor and East Asia and the EU became major creditors. My own suspicion is that the mid-Nineties marks the real turnaround, when the EU and Japan began pumping gargantuan amounts of liquidity into the system via superlow interest rates and bailouts of their semiperipheries (but then, I haven't done the math, so maybe Anwar is right after all). My own feeling is that we are indeed due for a long boom, but that the new metropoles will have to finance the thing, just like the US financed the 1945-75 boom. And that means politics will play a big role here -- Japan in particular is going to have to play catch-up to the EU, which is way ahead of East Asia in terms of long-term strategy and political organization. If they twiddle their thumbs for much longer, the EU is going to own them, but from Sakakibara's remarks it sounds like they're finally beginning to realize this and take counter-measures. -- Dennis
