ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will temporarily leave behind Marx’s laws of motion of capitalism in the long run and instead focus on the business cycle, i.e. the economic cycle that manifests not over an extended period of time but rather spans some 8 to 11 years. Why is there a business cycle? Why does economic expansion come to a stop and a general contraction take hold? Such a change in economic activity is not characteristic of a long-term trend – not, for example, a “long wave”, which is dealt with in Chapter 9.
