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Monday, May 30, 2022

All academic (1998)

Book Review from the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Economic Cycles by Solomos Solomou, Manchester University Press, 1998. £10.99

What should be a fascinating book about capitalism’s enigmatic trade cycle is marred by the academic pretentiousness of the author. How could it be otherwise with a writer whose egocentricity extends to the point whereby the citations for his own works on economic cycles are greater in number than those for Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, Kondratieff and Kuznets added together? That this book is part of Manchester University Press’s Insights From Economic History series makes this all the more remarkable and fantastic.

Solomou’s own particular insight into the boom-slump economy is that “the idea that business cycles can come to an end seems naive. Today we realise that economic fluctuations are part of economic life. Moreover, as we have a better understanding of concepts of equilibrium in economics, it is clear that the path of business cycles is not predictable”. Quite an “insight” indeed, only 150 years or so after Marx first said just about the same thing!

Students of the business cycle and of economic history would, frankly, be far better off reading some of the original texts of the various business cycle theorists, or, at the very least, some of the serious works written about them and their analyses. They would be better off too with a spread of the more intelligible contemporary accounts rendered by authors like Galbraith, Kindleberger and Beckman than with this scramble of convoluted academic-ese. They should also remember that while the precise course of the boom-slump cycle of capitalism is notoriously unpredictable, this does not mean that there are no observable tendencies about the development of capitalism at all, or for that matter, that the trade cycle and its devastating impact on human lives will be with us for evermore. The trade cycle can be abolished once and for all when the working class consciously organises to abolish trade, money, prices and profits altogether.
Dave Perrin

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