5.1 Outlining the theory.
It is now time for me to outline my own theory of the changes
in capitalist economic crises in the imperialist era, a theory which includes both short-term
industrial cycles and also long-term industrial cycles. In my view both of these cycles
today are the continuation of what was once a single cycle (called by Marx the “industrial
cycle”).
It is not that there “always were” two cycles (as Kondratiev
and others thought), stretching back even to the early 19th century or before.
Instead, up until the imperialist era there was only one true industrial cycle, usually with
a period of 5 to 10 years, though of course there were also non-cyclic longer periods of
generally better or generally worse economic performance. Those longer periods were in fact
themselves mostly an outgrowth of capitalism and the social conditions it led to,
including wars and revolutions. But these sorts of phenomena—though they were aspects of
capitalist society—were not themselves directly tied to the industrial cycle, nor were they
really cyclic themselves with any sort of internal regulating mechanism that led to a cycle
(let alone to a cycle with a constant period).
But it is also not my view that a totally new
and different cycle, with a totally new regulating mechanism and a longer period, has developed
in the imperialist era “in addition to” the old short-term cycle. Rather, I claim that the old
short-term cycle has itself split in two forming two cycles with different periods. I
will try to clarify how this is possible as we proceed.
Chapter I covered the “basic contradictions underlying
capitalist economic crises” and the second chapter covered the “surface layer” of contradictions.
As a first rough approximation, we may think of things this way: Before the era of
capitalist imperialism the confluence of the “basic contradictions” and “surface contradictions”
together coming to a head brought about the crisis phase of the standard (5 or 10 year)
industrial cycle. Over time these crises got more intense, but kept to their roughly same period
because all the contradictions building up came to a head and got resolved at more or
less the same time. But now, in the imperialist era, when only the “surface contradictions”
come to a head we have a (comparatively mild) recession, and when—less frequently—both
the “surface contradictions” together with the “basic contradictions” come to a head we
have a longer term and much more serious economic crisis, appropriately now called by the
different, older name, a depression.
However, that’s just a rough picture. It would not be correct
to say that only the surface contradictions drive the short-term cycles whereas both the
basic and surface contradictions drive the long-term cycles. Actually, both short and long cycles
in the imperialist era are driven by a combination of both “basic” and “surface” contradictions.
And it is the same fundamental contradiction, that between the restricted consumption of the
masses under capitalism and the tendency of the capitalists to keep expanding production without
limit, which now leads sometimes just to mild recessions, and—eventually—to a full-scale and
very severe depression.
In an earlier essay I summarized this theory as follows:
As indicated there, I attribute this splitting in two of
the industrial cycle primarily to government actions to control the economy, which during
the imperialist era have finally become determined enough and effective enough to actually
ward off the full development of an overproduction crisis—provided that the
basic underlying contradictions have not also come to a head yet.
What are the kinds of government actions I have in mind
here? They are just the sorts of things we talked about in chapter II; that is, utilizing
the various methods available to artificially expand the market for the “excess” commodities
that are being produced. They can lower interest rates, for example, to make it easier for
people to borrow money to buy homes, cars and other things. And if measures like that have
already been pushed to their limits (with interest rates being extremely low for example),
they can cut taxes or start public works programs or buy big and expensive new weapons for
the military. As mentioned in chapter II, the two primary things that they can do
are: 1) promote increased consumer debt and 2) build up more government debt (through
Keynesian fiscal deficits).
In other words, to resolve the surface contradictions
(for a while!), the government regulators of the capitalist economy can take steps which
serve to further develop the underlying contradiction—that the workers are not paid enough
to buy back all that they produce. This underlying contradiction is “further developed”
by means of ever-increasing debt. And it is correct to say the underlying contradiction is
“developed” or “intensified” because debt cannot possibly build up forever and at an ever
increasing pace, and therefore it must itself reach a final limit eventually.2
When it finally does reach its limit there is nothing more the capitalist government can
possibly do to ward off the economic disaster we now call a depression.
Still, it is a fact that capitalist governments are now
able to forestall this eventual catastrophe a number of times before the methods they use
become impossible to continue using. And this is why the economy now goes through a series
of short-term business cycles, each culminating in a relatively mild recession, before
finally reaching the point where yet another recession cannot be contained and proceeds
to develop into a major depression. In this way both the frequent mild recessions and also
the quite infrequent—but inevitable—major depressions are both explained by the same
theory.
There is, however, quite a bit more to say about all this.
Here are some of the many questions that might be raised which we will have to try to give
good answers to:
The fifth set of questions, which will require a lot of space to
answer, will be dealt with in Chapters VI and VII. I’ll address the other questions in the next few
sections.
5.2 The internal regulating mechanism(s) for the two cycles.
The first set of questions was about the internal regulating
mechanism(s) for the two cycles that now exist in the imperialist era. In my view, as I already
hinted, the regulating mechanism for the longer cycle today is in its abstract essence
the same as the regulating mechanism of the pre-monopoly industrial cycle, and that long cycle is
the primary continuator of the pre-monopoly cycle despite the fact that its period is different.
And the reason that this long cycle is the primary continuator of the pre-monopoly cycle is that
it also involves the full working out of all the same economic contradictions as in the past.
However, while the internal regulating mechanism of the long
cycle today is in its essentials or when viewed abstractly the same as the mechanism
for the pre-monopoly era industrial cycle, there are now some huge differences in how things
actually work out in the concrete. Now, as before, the crisis stage of the (now long-term) cycle
can only be resolved by the destruction—in one way or another—of the excess capital that has been
built up since the beginning of the cycle. So at that level of analysis things are the same. But
in the pre-monopoly era crises were mostly left to resolve themselves through a combination of
the devaluation (depreciation) and physical destruction of excess capital by the individual
capitalist companies themselves. Today, in the crises that develop at the end of the long cycles
(i.e., depressions), the private capitalist corporations no longer seem to be able to
destroy enough capital, or at least to destroy enough in a sufficiently short time, to resolve
such crises. Thus depressions drag on and on, even if there are some smaller ups and downs within
them. This was one of the lessons of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has been verified by
the economic history of the “long slowdown” of the past few decades.
Why are modern corporations unable to straight-away resolve this
excess capital problem on their own? There are a variety of things which explain this, and I’ll
only briefly sketch out a few of the most important ones here. First, giant corporations in the
imperialist era often have enormous reserves and can afford to shut down a number of plants for
quite a long time without actually dismantling them, and without themselves going bankrupt. Far
more than in the pre-monopoly era, modern corporations can try to wait out the economic crisis,
even if it goes on for years. And if demand then does start to pick up a bit, they already have
this reserve capital (mothballed factories and machinery) which they can very quickly bring back
into service—which blocks much of the investment in new factories that would otherwise
occur.
Secondly, when the reserves of individual corporations are
weakened or exhausted, in the imperialist era we typically have truly massive support for “private”
corporations by the bourgeois state. Weak corporations are usually boosted through tax breaks and
sometimes by other measures such as by special government orders for the things those companies
produce. Whole industries and even the entire private economy are granted such favors “when
necessary”. (One recent example is that in the period 1998-2005 most U.S. corporations did
not pay any Federal taxes! The huge tax credits that were granted to them over this period
were some of the major reasons.3)
Individual corporations, especially if they are viewed as critical
for the economy or “too big to fail”, are also bailed out with huge direct infusions of government
money. So instead of quickly destroying excess capital, special steps are taken to preserve
it—which prevents a powerful new boom from commencing. In extreme cases, companies are “nationalized”
for a while, or even whole industries. This has been especially common in Britain and continental
Europe. Then after the government pays off the accumulated huge debt for these industries and closes
a number of the most unprofitable enterprises, the supposedly “nationalized” companies are sold back
to individual capitalists again at a bargain. This nationalization racket has the additional benefit
for the bourgeoisie of discrediting “socialism” in the eyes of many (since the collective bourgeois
ownership of such depressed industries by the capitalist state is called “socialism” and is
constantly championed in the name of “socialism” by social democrats and other revisionists).
In addition to all that, it is a simple fact that in the
imperialist era the productive forces of capitalism have grown so enormously powerful, and the
economic and governmental forces promoting and facilitating consumer, business and government debt
have grown so strong, that the resulting “overhang” of excess capital that is built up between
depressions is simply phenomenal! That stupendous amount of capital simply cannot be quickly
destroyed—except possibly by some horrendous outside force. Conceivably this could occur through
some unprecedented natural disaster, but it would have to be something far more serious than a few
very powerful hurricanes. Possibly a medium-sized asteroid might do the job (assuming it was small
enough not to wipe out humanity completely!). But in the absence of such an unlikely external
“remedy”, the destruction of sufficient excess capital to create the conditions necessary for a
new economic boom seems to be possible only through the mutual action of the major capitalist
governments of the world. And not just any sort of action; as I just mentioned, these
governments most often actually seek to bail out corporations in danger of collapsing and thus
tend to do things which preserve excess capital rather than destroy it. No, it seems there
is only one thing that capitalist-imperialist governments are willing and able to do which
can truly end depressions—namely, to initiate and carry through massively destructive
inter-imperialist world wars. Certainly no capitalist ideologist will ever admit this, or even
come to understand this privately. But it is the horrendous truth of the matter.
This is how it has come to be that the most extreme
political actions that human beings are presently capable of, ultra-destructive world wars
which kill tens or hundreds of millions of people (and possibly even all of humanity
eventually), have come to be part of the “regulating mechanism” of the long-term capitalist
economic cycle in the imperialist era. I would imagine that even many revolutionaries and Marxists
might have a hard time coming to recognize and accept this horrible truth about capitalism. If you
think that my analysis of this matter is “over the top”, or otherwise unreasonable, then just
reserve your own opinion for now. (Some facts are just so shocking to people when they first
confront them that it takes some considerable period of time to come to accept that they actually
are facts.)
Of course it is possible, and today even quite likely
(fortunately!), that such a hyper-destructive inter-imperialist war might not occur for a very long
period of time (several decades even), and therefore all the excess capital which has been built
up over a long period of “good times” might not be soon destroyed in a new inter-imperialist
war. In that case the depression phase of the long-term capitalist economic cycle will just drag on
and on indefinitely (or else until people have had enough of capitalism and finally decide to get
rid of it once and for all). Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was a period
especially primed for a new inter-imperialist war, it took a decade for that to develop in Europe.
For reasons I will get into in Chapter VII, I expect it to take much longer than that for the
next depression to lead to all-out inter-imperialist war, and therefore the next depression will
last much longer than that of the 1930s.
But aren’t there other measures besides the massive destruction
of capital (through war or otherwise) that could bring the economy “out of” a depression? The
answer is “yes and no”, depending upon what we really mean here by bringing the economy out
of a depression. As we will discuss in Chapter VI, some countries (e.g., Germany and Sweden)
did manage to suspend the Great Depression of the 1930s, and other major capitalist
countries (including the U.S.) were at least able to partially mitigate the Depression,
through public works programs and Keynesian deficit spending. But these were measures that 1)
could work only because they hadn’t previously been pushed to their final limits, and 2) could
only work for a while. So yes, it is possible in some situations to interrupt or mitigate
a depression for a while by using the same methods we talked about in Chapter II which (for a
while!) prevent recessions from turning into depressions in the first place. But these
methods—and Keynesian deficits in particular—can only interrupt or temporarily mitigate, and
cannot truly cure or end depressions. If some massively destructive force (like world war)
does not soon develop and actually destroy the excess capital that has been built up over time,
then the depression will soon resume.
My conclusion, therefore, is still that only the massive
destruction of capital can truly end the depression which develops at the end of the long-term
economic cycle. Any mere interruptions or easings of that depression through Keynesian or other
means will only be temporary and will merely contribute to the ups and downs we certainly expect
within such depressions. And it is my thesis that hyper-destructive inter-imperialist world
wars are thus now part of the controlling mechanism of the long economic cycle, since they have
become in practice necessary to end such cycles. As I mentioned in section 4.1, the
pre-monopoly era industrial cycle was primarily an economic cycle, but the long-term cycle
today is more of a political-economic cycle.4
And since inter-imperialist war represents the highest concentration of political contradictions
it is not at all surprising that such wars have now become the concluding episode in these
long-term political-economic cycles.
* * *
The short cycle today, despite the fact that it has the same
period as the pre-monopoly cycle, is not the primary continuator of the pre-monopoly cycle
because not all the same contradictions as before come to a head, and—in particular—the
primary contradiction, that the workers are not paid enough to buy back all that they produce
(or in other words the contradiction between the restricted consumption of the masses and the
compulsion of the capitalists to keep expanding production without limit), does not come to a
head in the crisis period of the short cycles and does not get resolved.
The short cycles today have more or less the same period
as the pre-monopoly cycles because the surface contradictions leading up to their initiation
are the same. Once they begin they usually get contained and resolved in a relatively short period
of time by government interventions which resolve those surface contradictions by means which
further aggravate the underlying basic contradictions (and especially the primary underlying
contradiction)—but which still do not allow those underlying basic contradictions to
themselves come to a head. So the governing mechanism for the short cycles is now still pretty
much the same as with pre-monopoly era cycles as far as their initiation goes, but is
somewhat different as far as how they get resolved. The best way to think about this, as
I suggested earlier, is that short cycles are now interrupted cycles, or short-circuited
cycles.
That’s the basic situation with regard to the internal regulation
of modern short cycles, but I think it is also fair to say that in recent decades governments have
become more “proactive” in dealing with the economy, and in some cases this has probably allowed
them to prolong the periods of prosperity within the short cycle. Even Japan, which now (in 2008)
is once again entering a recession, seems to have just finished up its longest period between
recessions since World War II after having been in and out of recession for the whole period from
1989 to 2001. Governments have also sometimes been able to mitigate and sometimes postpone the
advent of a developing recession by very quick action. One example of this was the big tax rebates
granted to U.S. taxpayers in the spring of 2008 before it was even certain that a recession was
developing. This may have helped postpone the start of the current recession by several months, or
else mitigated its early stages.
The related question raised at the end of section 5.1 is: How are
the short cycles actually brought under control and ended, and why can’t the longer cycles be
controlled and ended in the same way? I think I have already more or less answered this, but in a
nutshell the crisis periods of the short cycles (recessions) are ended by aggravating the factors
that will eventual bring the long cycle into its crisis stage (a depression). By stimulating the
economy by building up consumer and government debt the economy is brought out of its immediate
recession mess, but only at the expense of the future by bringing a depression that much closer and
making it all the harder to deal with when it finally arrives.
5.3 Are the short and long economic cycles worsening over time?
The second set of questions raised in section 5.1 are about
whether it is still true, as Marx and Engels said, that the way crises are resolved leads to
“more extensive and more destructive crises” and diminishes “the means whereby crises are
prevented”?5 And does this apply to both the modern recessions
(at the end of short cycles) and also depressions (at the end of long cycles)? And finally, will
these new cycles themselves also continue to worsen over time?
Of course there always appeared to be a slight inconsistency to
what Marx and Engels said there as compared to what they also said in the Manifesto and later
about the destruction of capital being the means to resolve crises. If the cause of economic
crises is the overproduction of capital itself, then the destruction of capital should in
fact end the crisis and allow the process of capitalist accumulation to begin anew just as
fresh and powerfully as before! That is, ending a crisis by destroying the excess capital does
not lead to more extensive and more destructive crises nor does it diminish the means whereby
crises are prevented. But even in the 19th century crises were actually resolved by a
combination of the destruction of capital and by other means, and those other means did in fact in
the end lead to the negative results that Marx and Engels mentioned. Opening up new markets in
foreign lands, for example, did help in the short run, but only by eliminating one unused outlet for
capital and commodities that could have been used later. Similarly, the creation of new credit
(whether consumer debt or government debt) can help resolve a current crisis, but only by diminishing
the amount of debt that can be added later and by leading to a bigger crisis when those new debt
bubbles eventually collapse. All the methods we talked about in Chapter II actually began, if only
in tentative and limited ways in some cases, back in the pre-monopoly era. So yes, Marx and Engels
were right after all to say that the actual means being used to resolve crises did at least partly
include methods which would lead to more extensive and more destructive crises later on.
In one way, quite obviously, the splitting in two of the industrial
cycle has very much changed what Marx and Engels said about the tendency of crises to continually
worsen. Each short cycle crisis stage (recession) is definitely quite mild compared to each long
cycle crisis stage (depression). That is the whole gist of the theory.
But what about the string of recessions within each long cycle? Do
they get progressively worse? Actually, in general they don’t. In fact, as the capitalist government
improves its ability to manage the surface contradictions of the economy, these recessions might even
get milder for a while. The 10 U.S. recessions since World War II (up through the one in 2001) lasted
10.4 months on average, and real GDP declined an average of about 2% from peak to trough. But the
last two of these recessions were comparatively mild, each officially lasting just 8 months, with
real GDP falling only 1.3% in the 1990-91 downturn, and—according to official statistics (which,
however, lie a lot!)—just 0.4% in the 2001 recession.6
There is even a tendency for governments to get more and more
reckless in their promotion of consumer debt and in their resorts to massive Keynesian deficits,
which for a time can make it seem like they really know how to control the economy very well. However,
towards the very end of the string of recessions I would guess that as it gets harder and harder to
keep each new one from developing into a depression, that these recessions will indeed become
generally deeper and definitely more dangerous and worrisome to both the government and the
populace.
And finally, what about the string of depressions over a much
longer period of time? Will they get worse and worse? Conceptually this is by no means necessary.
If each depression completely wipes out the huge overhang of excess capital that has developed since
the previous depression, then the ground should be cleared for a powerful new boom. This might
especially be the case if there has been a major world war which wiped out not only the excess
capital, but even a large part of the capital that was not truly “excess”.
But there are factors which complicate this “ideal” situation.
One major factor was that the capitalist governments at first (during the first depression, as we
use the term today, the Great Depression of the 1930s) didn’t quite know what they were doing yet.
Their mismanagement of the Depression showed tremendous ineptness, though much more so in some
countries than others. (We’ll get into that in the next chapter.) This definitely made that
depression much worse than it had to be (or at least far worse than it had to be that soon!).
On the other hand, the very fact that the capitalists have become
much more skilled at controlling and resolving recessions than they used to be means that they are
now able to build up the underlying basic contradictions of capitalist production to a vastly
more intense level before they pop. This in turn means that when they finally do pop, it is
all the more serious and intractable situation! In fact, if they hadn’t learned these skills of
economic management, by now there would have probably been at least one more depression
already—which would have then got interrupted for a while by intense Keynesian measures and then
resumed, possibly cycling like that several times in a row unless some inter-imperialist war, such
as the one that almost happened between U.S. imperialism and the revisionist Soviet Union,
resolved the issue through the unparalleled destruction of capital (and quite possibly also of
humanity itself).
I don’t want to steal too much thunder from Chapter VII, but what
has actually happened so far is something rather different: There was a post World War II boom
after the massive destruction of capital during World War II, and within this overall boom period
there were several recessions. But then around 1973 there was a fundamental change. The whole
capitalist world economy changed for the worse, and has not recovered to this very day. In fact
at the present time there appears to be another “tipping point” in progress into an even worse
overall period. There are two ways to look at this: Either this “long slowdown” over the past 35
years is itself the first mild stage of a very prolonged new depression, or else it is the swan
song of the last boom. There would have definitely been a new depression commencing in the
early 1970s had there not been intense measures to prevent this then, and pretty much constantly
since then, to keep it from breaking out (at least in full force). (Those intense measures
are, once again, the same that are used to control and cure every recession, but since 1973 the
“control” and “cure” has only been very limited and partial!)
In short, my view is that the next depression, will—at
least during its worse period—be much worse, and almost certainly far longer (even
if the long slowdown that has already occurred is not counted as part of it), than that of the
1930s. But it will also contain a great many sub-periods and ups and downs, including short term
business cycles. But we’ll get into more about all this later on.
Just briefly I want to raise one final issue here: The possible
connection of the “split crisis” theory to what is often called the “breakdown theory”, that is,
the theory that capitalist economic crises will get continually worse until they lead to the actual
breakdown, or total collapse of capitalism. There have been a number of versions of this theory,
some rather superficial or simple-minded, but in the end it may well turn out to be
correct.7
I can see at least two possibilities here about how the “breakdown
theory” may yet prove correct. First, the hopeful version (“hopeful” even though even it requires
great sacrifices on the part of the masses): If the coming depression (or conceivably a later one,
if humanity survives this next one and capitalism still exists) proves to be as intractable as I
believe it will be, and if it drags on and on for years and years or even decades and decades, then
for this and possibly other reasons (such as the growing environmental crisis) there may be a
powerful resurgence in anti-capitalist revolutionary ideas. Even if for a time the capitalists
resort to various foolish and/or horribly criminal schemes, such as various forms of fascism, in
the end the people might be able to overthrow capitalism worldwide and institute genuine socialism
and finally communism. On this hopeful scenario, the masses will resort to revolution to get rid
of capitalism before the leading capitalist-imperialist powers start a world war. The
economic “breakdown” of capitalism in the form of intractable depression will have been either
the main reason, or else one of the major reasons, which brings the people to revolution.
However, an alternative scenario in which the “breakdown theory”
turns out to be correct is also possible. “Imperialism means war”, said Lenin, and if the world
capitalist economy really falls into an intractable economic depression the pressures toward
inter-imperialist world war—which always exist at some level or other—will over time greatly
intensify. While I doubt that the imperialists themselves will ever come to understand that the
only way they have to truly resolve depressions in the imperialist era is through world war, they
will eventually start to act as if they understood this. They will blame each other for
their own economic problems, instead of their common capitalist economic system, and for reasons
like this (as well as the fundamental desire of each imperialist superpower to control the whole
world) they will eventually go to war despite their own great fear of it. And world war today,
with massive numbers of powerful thermonuclear weapons, most likely means the end of humanity.
This version of the “breakdown theory” is about the final breakdown of not only capitalism, but
also of Homo sapiens as a species.
We Marxists have always known that if humanity is to have a
future it must relatively soon overthrow capitalism everywhere in the world. This basic truth is
only further underlined by the probable eventual truth to the “breakdown theory”. In my estimation,
humanity’s choices really will come down to this: Get rid of capitalism, or die from it.
5.4 Are these new long cycles really cycles?
To be appropriately called a “cycle” there must at least be a
recurring series of quite similar phenomena or events and some driving mechanism that leads from
stage to stage within each iteration of the cycle, and from one iteration to the next, in at
least a roughly repeating pattern. In many kinds of cycles (not all!) each iteration of the
cycle takes at least roughly the same time, which is called the period of the cycle. For
wave-like cycles, the period can be taken to be the usual or average time from one trough to the
next, or from one crest to the next.
One of the common cycles in nature which does not have any fixed
period is the carbon cycle in the earth’s ecosystem in which carbon dioxide from the air
is fixed by photosynthesis in plants into more complex organic compounds, but then is eventually
transformed again into carbon dioxide through decay and other processes (sometimes involving
animals). Sometimes carbon is “fixed” in plants and animals for decades or even centuries, and
other times the carbon dioxide is returned to its inorganic form in hours or even minutes.
The “period” of the industrial cycle—even during pre-monopoly
capitalism—was never very precise. However, it did usually tend to be from 4 or 5 years (at the
low end) to 10 or 12 years (at the high end). Marx sometimes referred to it as the decennial
cycle, though more often today it would be appropriate to call it the “5 to 10 year” industrial
cycle. The fact that the industrial cycle never really did have a precise period by no means kept
it from being appropriately referred to as a cycle.
It is useful to think for a moment about just why the
standard industrial cycle sometimes has a period of 5 years (or less) and sometimes of 10 or 12
years (or perhaps more). No doubt the exact reasons vary with each cycle. But clearly there must
be some factors affecting the development of the cycle that affect not only its general development
from stage to stage but also the period of the cycle itself. In other words, the industrial
cycle (even during the 19th century) was the sort of cycle whose regulating mechanisms
could also affect the period of the cycle, sometimes making it longer and sometimes shorter.
Now that the industrial cycle has split in two in the imperialist
era, how has that affected the periods of the standard and long-term cycles? In general the standard
cycle has been little affected. Possibly the cycle has sometimes been lengthened a bit in recent
decades due to more sophisticated intervention by the Federal Reserve and other parts of the
government, but the effect has certainly not been overly pronounced.
But when it comes to the question of what the “period” of the
long-term cycle (or “wave”) is, it is no longer clear that there is much of any definite period
here at all. There are several reasons for this, but the biggest one is that the depression stage
of the long cycle can continue for enormously different times—and possibly even
indefinitely.8
If it is true, as I have argued, that (barring social revolution)
the depression phase of the long-term cycle can only be resolved through the tremendous destruction
of capital in an inter-imperialist world war, then the “period” or length of this cycle is now
determined by events in the political sphere that might take quite different amounts of time to
develop in different circumstances. For this reason I don’t think it is useful to talk about “the
period” of the long-term industrial cycle.
But even if the long-term cycle does not have any definite period
(other than being quite long as compared to the standard industrial cycle), it is nevertheless
still a cycle. It will continue to cycle indefinitely until one of two things happens: humanity gets
rid of capitalism or capitalism gets rid of humanity.