Ciclos ou ondas longas?: o tratamento das flutuações de temporalidade longa em Kondratieff, Schumpeter e Mandel

Abstract

The alternation between periods of economic prosperity and acute crises that makes up the history of capitalist development attracts the interest of many researchers who seek to understand and systematize how this occurs. For some, such as Kondratieff and Schumpeter, these oscillatory movements are the expression of long cycles, which in turn result from the dynamics of accumulation. For others, like Mandel, they are the expression of long waves, which depend not only on elements intrinsic to the dynamics of accumulation, but also on the constant interaction of these with other factors, with different degrees of interdependence, which make up social, historical, political and economic. The construction of this dissertation indicates that Mandel's perception is closer to the concrete, complex historical reality that is embedded in economic life than that of his counterparts in the long cycles. In this way, the greater detail of his theory and his analysis of postwar capitalism, contained in this work, allows us to raise important points. The analysis proposed by Mandel, in view of his theoretical ambition, contains some flaws. We present the main ones, the most serious of which refer to the fragility of some of their historical interpretations and the empirical data used by the author, which do not have a more systematic treatment, making them often infectious, in view of the theoretical perspective outlined. Nonetheless, his method of analysis, seeking the integration of endogenous and "exogenous" elements into the process of accumulation, seems to us to be indispensable for the understanding of the current historical block.