charles brown asked > I've asked this before, but are there any efforts to > connect long wave > observations to practice ? In other words, how might > left economists, > knowing the timing of long waves, suggest strategies > and tactics for
In my view, it's not the timing of ups and downs that is applicable to practice but understanding of the strategic vulnerabilities that appear at certain times and in specific sites of potential struggle. You don't have to be thinking in terms of long waves to analyze those, as Lenin did in Imperialism and Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. I would suggest that the epoch or stage that Lenin identified as Imperialism, I would identify with "formal subsumption of administrative labour in the sphere of circulation" or the explicit disciplining of an army of clerks. Gramsci's Fordism moves into the early phase of real subsumption in the circulation sphere. Just for fun, I'd throw in Veblen and those who subsequently sought to operationalize his observations (Chase, Dahlberg, Technocrats) with Lenin and Gramsci. In terms of what's actually happening now, as opposed to in some abstract and general scheme of class struggle, I think Andre Gorz's proposals were most responsive to the "latest epoch of capital that the succesive long waves have brought us to", if not to the timing of the ups and downs. I'm thinking of his Critique of Economic Reason, which was summarized as a discussion paper, "Trade unions between neo-corporatism and an expansion of their role." http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/gorz.html To sum up even briefer, Gorz's argument is that we're at "the end of work as we know it." And although Gorz took Marxism to task in his book, Marx had already anticipated Gorz's argument in the Grundrisse. It just occured to me that what would be useful, if it was possible, would be a time series graph of "waste" -- something like "GDP - GPI = Waste" only more comprehensive than GPI. Michael Perelman follows in the footsteps of Veblen and Chase in cataloguing the immense and growing mountain of waste that both undergirds and weighs down contemporary capitalism. I imagine a time series graph of waste would exhibit long wave cycles. I don't know if such a graph would tell us exactly when the time is right to strike but I'm sure it would tell us that the time is long past due. ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
