[PEN-L:2962] Re: Re: Long waves

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the Afterword to the Second German Edition to vol. I of _Capital_ , Marx says:

"The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycles, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis..."

But how does knowledge about the cause or pattern of the cycle improve or inform political practice ? Marxist economists discuss "periodic cycles" but that is not the focus of their work. For example, it is Chapter  15 in Victor Perlo's _Super Profits and Crises_. Demonstrating continuous exploitation, mass unemployment, poverty, waste, monopoly profits, etc is the Marxist economist's focus, not predicting the periodic cycle. How does predicting the periodic cycle help the working class to overthrow the bourgeoisie ?

Charles Brown

>>> Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> 02/05 4:09 PM >>>
Barkley wrote:
>Louis,
>    You may think that "business cycles" are a "bourgeois
>concept" but Karl Marx certainly didn't.  Check it out in
>Volume III of _Capital_.

I thought Marx wrote about things like the crisis of overproduction.
"Business cycles" reminds me too much of plainting cycles, like making sure
to get the tulip bulbs in the ground before the first frost in order to see
them bloom in April.