[PEN-L:2937] Re: Long waves

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

Louis,
     Although there are bourgeois economists who do long 
waves, it has a long history of study by Marxists who were 
among the first to promulgate the idea.  Trotsky was a fan 
of the idea very early on, the obvious source of Mandel's 
interest.  The person most widely associated with it was 
Kondratiev who was indeed a Soviet Marxist.  However Stalin 
agreed with your views on math in econ and had Kondratiev 
executed during the 1930s purges for "formalism," that 
awful crime against the international proletariat.
     And Anwar Shaikh is one of the purer Marxists 
operating in today's economics academia.
Barkley Rosser
On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 14:30:17 -0500 Louis Proyect 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Charles wrote:
> >What is the political significance of long waves ? At the crest or  the
> trough or in between , capitalism still needs to go. How does knowing there
> are long waves help to bring that about ?
> >What is Shaikh's practice ?
> 
> Charles, economists have always strived for inclusion in the world of
> science, especially those with ties to the academy, like most PEN-L'ers.
> The reason something like "long waves" has such an appeal is that by
> writing dense, math-clogged treatises on the subject, you can fool yourself
> into believing that you are doing something akin to what the people at
> Columbia's Lamont-Doherty earth science labs are doing. In reality, all
> bourgeois economics--all of it--is unscientific. When Marxist economists
> try to vie with their professional colleagues, they inevitably make
> concessions to the empirical bias of this very unscientific profession.
> 
> Louis Proyect
> 
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]