Long Waves and Social Structures of Accumulation

In the 1920s Nikolai Kondratieff proposed that Western capitalist economies had cycles lasting about half a century. Later, he was jailed and then executed during the Soviet purges of the 1930s. Since then, the notion of long-waves proposed by Kondratieff was mostly ignored or rejected by economists, both in the East and the West. However, in the 1970s and later decades K-waves—as the long waves proposed by Kondratieff were renamed—were seen by some historians and heterodox economists as representing a proper tool to analyze the long-run dynamics of capitalism. The notion of social structures of accumulation (SSA) was developed by radical economists as referring to the set of national economic and political institutions that would be the structures providing a base for the K-wave. Because an examination of the chronologies of K-waves proposed by different authors for the period between the 1920s and the present reveals major inconsistencies, and because the SSA notion also reveals major theoretical and statistical contradictions with economic data of past decades, the conclusion of the chapter is that these are notions that are not useful for a proper analysis of modern capitalism.