From Carlota Perez to Paul Mason and Cédric Durand, many analysts of contemporary capitalism have embraced the concept of long waves that the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev first put forward. But if capitalism develops through long waves, with upswings and downswings in its trajectory, what is the logic underpinning such waves?

The Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel offered one of the most detailed explanations in his book Long Waves of Capitalist Development, based on a series of lectures given by the author at the University of Cambridge in 1978. For Mandel, the existence of these “long waves” is an empirically established fact. Its Marxist explanation is essentially based on the long-term fluctuations of the profit rate, which, in turn, ultimately determine the pace of capital accumulation (i.e., economic growth and expansion in the world market).

Mandel cites two crucial indicators that empirically confirm the existence of “long waves,” namely industrial production and the growth of exports as a whole. The data indicates the following time periods with an ascending or a stagnating-depressive tendency: 1826–47 (stagnating-depressive); 1848–73 (expansive); 1874–93 (stagnating-depressive); 1894–1913 (expansive); 1914–39 (stagnating-depressive); 1940–67 (expansive); and from 1968 on, again a long wave with a stagnating-depressive tendency.