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Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation, by Ernest Mandel. 2nd revised edition. London: Verso, 1995. Paper, $23.00. Pp. viii, 174.
The late Ernest Mandel was one of the most lucid Marxist theorists, and this book confirms this reputation in terms of its clarity and cogency. Even readers who disagree with its premises will need to do their homework to combat his forceful arguments. The book is based on the Marshall Lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1980, and published at the time. The revision takes into account both developments in the real world and criticisms of colleagues since that time. Still, he left intact many passages which were predictive of events, enabling us to judge the strength of such analyses.
It is one of the curiosities of modern intellectual debate that the concept of economic "long waves" arouses so much negative passion, passion that comes in about equal measure from protagonists of neoclassical economics and from Marxists. Conversely, those who write about the centrality of "long waves" tend to be a bit more dispassionate, but are equally drawn from both the neoclassical and the Marxist camps. The antis have it numerically over the pros by far. It should be noted that almost all the antis accept the concept of quite short-term so-called business cycles as virtually self-evident, but demand quite high levels of evidence for longer-term cycles, especially for the so-called Kondratieff cycle (of 45-60 years). And, as has often been observed by the pros (including Mandel in this book), interest in and sympathy towards the concept of (Kondratieff) long waves seems to be itself the product of these long waves, such interest correlating with B-phases.
Mandel is writing within what he considers to be such a...