The Loooong Depression

I'm going through many cycles of enjoyment, boredom, and compulsion to continue reading Capital.  Right now I'm persevering through Chapter 15, which is 147 pages long and is entitled "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry."  It's like a book within a book.  It has a lot of graphs detailing the number of factories in England and Wales in 1858, 1861 and 1868 in comparison to the number of factories in Scotland and Ireland in the same time periods.  It's tedious.

Anyway, I'm finding some inspiration to keep going through this detailed chapter because it's Labor Day today.  Marx claims in this chapter that as the factory system expands and production increases, "the life of industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation."  This got me thinking about this cycle in terms of the U.S. and our current economic downturn.  In trying to understand what is happening today and the appropriate responses to the economy, people keep referring to the Great Depression.  But at least one scholar, Matthew Lynn, talks about how it is more relevant to the Long Depression of 1873-1896, which predicts that the end of our current depression will be in about 19 years.  

Yep.  How utterly depressing.

Marx attributes this cycle to a whole lot of things, and one important factor is due to the inherently unstable relationship between new technologies and workers.  According to Lynn's approach, the current downturn stems from a structural issue rather than a merely circumstantial one.  The system has to be fixed.  But "fixing" the system somehow doesn't equate to overthrowing Capitalism...the system will simply recalibrate and go on until I suppose moderate activity begins to sprout...and then, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation happens once again.

So, I wonder, will any scholars or revolutionaries out there be taking on mega-project that would rival Marx's Capital that might propose a new system that doesn't include this self-fulfilling prophecy?  I haven't heard of anything in the pipeline, but who knows.