ABSTRACT
This chapter explains in unadulterated Marxist terms the main features of modern economic history. It focuses on the post-1945 boom in the advanced industrial countries of the non-communist world, and the reasons "it would be followed by another long wave of increasing social and economic crisis for world capitalism, characterized by a far lower rate of overall growth". In deploying the cumbersome Marxist apparatus, the heart of Ernest Mandel's analysis is his interpretation of the Kondratieff cycle—a variation on Joseph Schumpeter's hypothesis in Business Cycles. The bulk of the analysis, however, is devoted to the evolution of the world economy since the 1930s; that is, the emergence of late capitalism. Mandel argues that multiple forces are tending to reduce the rate of profit; these are compounded by the pressure of wage demands in excess of productivity increases which can only be contained by incomes policies which he counsels labor to resist.
