Good post. (I imagine this is not entirely inconsistent with what Jim said since even many of the later "Long Cycle" theorists have an unabashedly empirical and ex post flavor.)
But I think it would be useful to distinguish "Long Cycle" from "Long Wave" (really more like long run trends). For Kondratieff, the long cycle accelerator theorists and other others of this type (endogenous, up and down as you point out) -- for them there is a true cycle. For Marx (Capital Vol III Part III), Mandel, Shaikh etc there is a "falling rate of profit" - a sort of one half of a cycle - i.e. a constant undertow against which capitalism must struggle through innovation and/or capital destruction. One could call this a half-cycle (endogenous) and reversing it requires an exogenous always-uncertain boost (indeed this is the way Mandel describes it). But I think this is better described as two counter-posing long run trends. Innovation or capital destruction are not exogenous to the process of capitalism and thinking like this more reflects narrow "economics" rather than "social theory".
Any references for the Dutch theorists you speak of?
But the original query sounded like a literature request. A standard Marxist critique of Kondratieff is perhaps Mandel 'Late Capitalism' Ch 4 and Shaikh 'An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories' (1978, I think on his web site) or Fred Moseley's work (on his web site). A left 'neo' or non marxist critique of Long Wave Theory might be an empirical paper by Ed Wolff in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, July 2003 (I can't think of more theoretical critiques at this point).
Paul
At 11:09 PM 12/7/2004 -0800, you wrote:
I think it is a little more complex than that. There are two or perhaps three basic theories of long 'waves'. Initially, in the work of Kondratieff, they were empiricist being based on long period analysis of commodity price movements.
But later economists, particular a school of Dutch economists, began to advance alternative theories to explain what appears to be 45-60 year fluctuations in economic activity -- approximately 25 years of robust expansion followed by a similar period of stagnation and weak economic performance. There was no strict periodicity and the major debate began as to whether there was any endogenous causes for the upturns and downturns or whether (particularly the upturns) were exogenous. Within the endogenous school there were those who thought the long waves were indeed endogenous cycles caused by such things as the capital life of infrastructure (an endogenous accelerator). Others suggested that it was major technological changes in infrastructure (steam engine, railways, internal combustion/electricity, automobile/aircraft, electronics) based on a Schumpeterian kind of model. Others suggest a sort of invention/innovation cycle where a steady increase in invention eventually produced a critical mass for major economic innovation -- the so-called septic tank model. All these groups of theories were based on sinisoidal wave where turning points were endogenously generated although the Schumpeterian model could also be interpreted as a sigmoidal wave where each expansion was caused by some exogenous event or events which had no specific periodicity.
Perhaps the most interesting is that associated with the late Ernst Mendel who argued that the peak and subsequent decline was associated with the falling rate of profit while the upturns were exogenous in the sense that they were not generated by economic forces but by political forces resulting in wars that destroyed capital and set off a new wave of accumulation. Finally we have the long wave hypotheses suggested by the French regulation school and the US Social Structures of Accumulation school. In both cases institutional change was an integral part in the wave like motion.
Paul Phillips
