What’s Sauce For Monroe’s Goose, Is Sauce For Putin’s Gander.

Not In My Back Yard! If the American President, Joe Biden, has forgotten the lessons of 60 years ago, then the Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin, has not. Unacceptable in 1962, the stationing of military resources (including tactical nuclear weapons) along Russia’s borders remains unacceptable in 2022.

IT WAS BURIED DEEP in his State of the Union address to Congress. A warning to the great powers of his day that any attempt to once again colonise the Western Hemisphere would be regarded as a direct threat to the national security of the United States of America. The year was 1823. The President delivering the State of the Union address was James Monroe. And the declaration that the entire Western Hemisphere of the globe was an American sphere of influence became known as “The Monroe Doctrine”. It remains a core principle of US foreign policy to this very day.

What amazes historians about the Monroe Doctrine is the sheer affrontery of the United States in declaring half the world off-limits to powers in possession of considerably more wealth and military strength than itself. One can only imagine the lips of the rulers of Great Britain, France, Russia and Prussia curling in contempt at this jackanape of a republic presuming to teach the world its business.

Not that the great powers of the day misunderstood the reasoning motivating President Monroe and his advisers. The Spanish Empire: which had once embraced the whole of the South American continent (except Brazil) Central America and what is now Mexico, the South-Western states of the US and California; had just lost, or was in the process of losing, her American possessions – just as, forty years earlier, Great Britain had lost her thirteen North American colonies. Monroe’s Doctrine warned Europe’s rulers: “Don’t even think about trying to take them back!”

Why, then, is it so difficult, one year from the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, for the United States to comprehend why the Russian Federation might want to declare Eastern Europe, the Ukraine in particular, off-limits to the NATO alliance?

Twice, in just over a century, vast armies have swept eastward across the Great European Plain to wreak havoc upon the peoples of, first, the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union. In the last invasion, led by Nazi Germany (in alliance with Romania, Hungary and Italy) more than 20 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. Had the Nazis won, it was their plan to starve as many again to death, emptying the broad wheatlands of the Ukraine of human inhabitants in preparation for their permanent “Germanisation”.

It is a melancholy fact that the only American president who truly appreciated what had happened to the Russian people was John F. Kennedy. Hardly surprising, really, since his refusal to tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, which he deemed to be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, had brought him face-to-face with the certainty that casualties numbering in the scores-of-millions would be America’s fate if he and General-Secretary Khrushchev did not step back from the brink of Armageddon.

In his famous 1963 speech to the students of the American University, in Washington DC, Kennedy described the Soviet Union’s experience in terms these young Americans could understand:

“[N]o nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland – a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis was, of course, sparked by the United States decision to install Jupiter nuclear-tipped missiles along the Soviet Union’s border with Turkey – a NATO ally. The quiet withdrawal of those missiles was the quid-pro-quo for Khrushchev’s withdrawal of his Cuban missile batteries.

If the United States President, Joe Biden, has forgotten the lessons of 60 years ago, then the Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin, has not. Unacceptable in 1962, the stationing of significant military resources (including tactical nuclear weapons) along Russia’s borders remains unacceptable in 2022.

Would the United States tolerate a hostile, Russian-backed, military alliance refusing to rule out inviting Mexico to become a member? Any US President who allowed a nuclear-armed rival to establish a puppet regime just across America’s southern border would be rightly accused of abandoning the Monroe Doctrine, and impeached.

Why, then, can’t President Joe Biden acknowledge that President Putin is asserting no more than President Monroe – and with considerably greater justification?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 January 2022.

Doubling-Down On Donald Trump's Dream.

Willing Victims: What would all those Americans in MAGA hats be left with if they abandoned Trump? Just the sick feeling of having been cheated. Just the knowledge that the man in the White House is nothing more than a shape-shifting New York grifter; and that they have always been his “marks” – the hapless victims of his con.

WHY DO THEY stay with him? What keeps all those guys with the rolled-brim MAGA caps coming back for more? Why is it that nothing: not facts, not ridicule, not the scorn of sensible women, hell, not even Covid-19, can break the faith of Donald Trump’s followers? The world keeps posing the question, but Trump’s people won’t, or can’t, answer.

The historian in me comes back with a question of his own: “Why did the working-class of the Soviet Union stay with Joseph Stalin? He’d laid them waste like a field of corn, but the surviving stubble kept cheering him on. Not the NKVD, not the gulags, not even all those pistol shots in the back of their neighbours’ skulls were enough to keep the workers’ tears at bay when the monster finally died.

Could it be that the story he told them, like Trump’s, was so compelling, so empowering, that they couldn’t let it go?

Stalin called them the most important people on the planet: the beating heart of a great experiment that was changing the world. No, they weren’t clever intellectuals like Trotsky. They weren’t ambitious climbers like the party apparatchiks. They certainly weren’t hard-hearted money-grubbers like the rich peasants. No, they were just the hard-working toilers of hand and brain – the ones left standing after the Party had shot all the others. Ordinary, decent proletarians: the soul of the Revolution.

And doesn’t all of that sound oddly familiar? Not all the stuff about Trotsky, apparatchiks and proletarians – the American working-class has never bought into all that socialist mumbo-jumbo – but the bit about being the most important people on the planet. That’s the key: Trump’s promise that, as hard-working White Americans they constitute the rock-solid core of the world’s greatest, most exceptional and indispensable nation.

They may not be as clever as all those talking pointy-heads on CNN. They’re not cold-eyed bureaucrats like the people on the other side of the welfare counters. And they’re certainly not crawlers like the guys who always seem to escape being laid-off when the economy turns sour. No, they’re nothing like that. They’re just the hard-working, hard-drinking, working-class sons-of-bitches who want to make America great again.

To abandon Trump makes no more sense to these good ole boys than abandoning Stalin would have made to the long-suffering Russian worker. Were they to do that it would mean that it had all been an almighty con. All those assurances about them being the soul of the revolution; the bedrock of the American dream; would have been lies.

It would have meant that all the clever people, the ambitious people, the successful people: the ones with the ideals and talents to transform Russia; the people the Party had murdered in their millions; had died for nothing. Just as, turning to the contemporary USA, it would mean that all the promises to bring the factories back from China – along with steady jobs, living wages and good health plans – were never meant seriously. That they were always just words rolling-up on the teleprompter of some obscene political game show.

What would all those guys in MAGA hats be left with then? Just the sick feeling of having been cheated. Just the knowledge that the man in the White House is everything seven-out-of-ten of the women in their lives have been saying he is for the past four years. That Trump is nothing more than a shape-shifting New York grifter; and that they have always been his “marks” – the hapless victims of his con.

And if they were forced to admit that, then they would also have to admit that all the cultural and racial furies Trump has aroused – mostly within people like themselves – were nothing more that the profoundly disreputable means employed to secure the Republican Party’s equally disreputable ends. Worse still, it would mean that 120,000 of their fellow Americans – twice the number that died in Vietnam – have perished needlessly. That the worst depression since the 1930s, into whose twilight their beloved country is fast descending, could have been avoided.

Like all those stunned Russian workers forced to watch their precious Soviet Union simply blip-off History’s screen, Trump’s working-class American followers would be left with an agonising existential choice. Give up the illusion, or double-down on the dream.

Russia chose Putin. Who will America choose?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 June 2020.

Why I'm A 'Russlandversteher' - A 'Russia Understander'.

Political Hard Man: Is Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, a hard man? Yes, he is. But after the democratic delights of the Yeltsin years, a hard man was exactly what the Russian people were looking for - and are happy to keep voting for.

BEFORE CRITICISING THOSE who continue to treat Russia as an “evil empire”, I should first explain why I am happy to embrace the German title of Russlandversteher - Russia Understander. It’s not only because I know that without the extraordinary sacrifices of the Russian people during the Second World War (twenty million dead!) the United States and British Empire losses would have been much, much higher. It is also because our side – the West – has consistently demonstrated the most appalling bad faith towards the Russians. How any nation on the receiving-end of such strategic malevolence could end up being anything other than defensive and mistrustful is difficult to imagine.

Consider the fact that the Manhattan Project (the United States and British effort to create an atomic bomb) was deliberately kept secret from the Soviets. A weapon which, had it been used against Nazi Germany, could have saved millions of Russian lives (as it almost certainly saved millions of American lives when used against the Japanese) was withheld from the nation that was doing all of the heavy-lifting against fascism.

How would you have reacted to the news that your allies were developing a new super-weapon without you? Do you think it would have increased your level of trust in the USA and the British Empire? Or, would it have pushed your paranoia to new heights? Would it have caused you to be relaxed about the political complexion of post-war Eastern Europe? Or, would it have led you to create a series of socialist buffer-states under strict Russian control?

Never forget, the Cold War began at a time when the Soviet Union lay in ruins: its people and economy utterly exhausted; and its armed forces completely vulnerable to the USA’s growing stockpile of atomic weaponry. Was Joseph Stalin really going to risk the total annihilation of what remained of the Soviet population by ordering the Red Army to advance all the way to the English Channel?

It is also worth remembering that even after the Soviet Union acquired its own atomic weapon in August 1949, not one Russian combat-boot was ever stamped upon the soil of the so-called “Free World”.

Fast forward to the collapse of the Soviet Empire between 1989 and1991. Was there ever a more auspicious moment to turn the page on mutual and assured destruction and demilitarise the entire European continent? The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, certainly believed that such a moment was at hand. He sought – and was given – the personal assurance of the American president, George H.W. Bush, that the Nato powers would not attempt to fill the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

Did Nato keep its promise? Like hell it did! Within the space of a very few years, new Nato members ringed the territory of the Russian Federation. Stalin’s worst fears had become the Russian Federation’s strategic reality.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. With the collapse of Communist Party rule, the Russian state and its vast portfolio of publicly-owned industries and natural resources was asset-stripped bare. With the “help” of the West’s economic “shock therapists”, the Russian Federation was transformed into a corrupt kleptocracy: a “mafia-state” ruled by a collection of “oligarchs” whose twisted characters Dostoevsky would have struggled to depict. Not surprisingly, the life-expectancy of the average Russian began to track backwards.

This was the Russia that greeted Vladimir Putin when he was finally in a position to replace the Western powers’ favourite drunk, Boris Yeltsin. Was Putin, a former KGB colonel, a hard man? Yes, he was. But after the democratic delights of the Yeltsin years, a hard man was exactly what the Russian people were looking for. Was his arrival generally considered to be bad news for Russia’s oligarchs? You bet! Especially after Putin arranged for one or two of them to be put on trial in cages – to encourage the others. Was anybody in Russia, aside from a handful of Western-aligned politicians and journalists, unduly upset by their President’s actions? Not really. Not when soaring oil and gas prices were delivering higher living-standards to millions of ordinary Russian citizens.

A prosperous and self-confident Russian Federation under strong political leadership was not, however, in Nato’s script. The deep-state denizens of the Western alliance looked at their maps and concluded (as so many geopolitical strategists had done before them) that the best way of getting their hands around Russia’s throat was through Ukraine.

Putin watched with growing alarm as Ukraine’s very own colour revolution (i.e. Western-inspired protests followed by a Western-assisted election campaign) installed an anti-Russian regime just a few hundred kilometres from Moscow. When Putin’s pushback resulted in the creation of a Moscow-friendly government in Kiev, the West upped the ante. With the blessing of European Union leaders, neo-Nazi hoodlums were unleashed on the streets of the Ukrainian capital. The pro-Russian Government fell. For the first time since the end of World War II, the West accorded diplomatic recognition to an overtly fascist regime.

We all know the rest. Russia annexes the Crimean Peninsula. Russian-speaking Ukrainians rise up against the fascists in Kiev. Russian volunteers cross the border in support. The West imposes sanctions and moves armoured units eastwards to “head-off Russian aggression”. Russian hackers of undetermined political status attempt to set off a colour revolution of their own. Donald Trump is elected President of the United States.

Do I really need to write any more about the sort of people who denounce the Russian Federation and its leader? Or why I am so happy to be called a Russlandversteher?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 6 April 2018.

The Great Fear: Why Farmers Won’t Let The Health And Safety Reform Bill Pass.

Hard Going: All attempts to intrude regulations pertinent to the general welfare of all New Zealanders beyond the farm gate has invariably been met with ferocious political opposition. Whether it be the public’s “right to roam”, the doomed “Fart Tax”, the Emissions Trading Scheme, or, in just the last few weeks, the Health and Safety Reform Bill, the cry of New Zealand’s cockies has been – "They shall not pass!"

 

IT WAS GENOCIDE of a special kind. Relentless mass killing inspired not by ethnicity, or religion, but by the victims’ social and economic position. “The liquidation of the Kulaks as a class” was one of Joseph Stalin’s greatest crimes. Farmers around the world looked on in horror, and their instinctive hostility towards the collectivising tendencies of city-based socialists congealed into an implacable hatred.

 

As a political designation, “Kulak” is derived from the Polish word for “fist” – as in “tight fisted” – making it, from the very beginning, a term of abuse for those farmers who had worked harder and smarter than their neighbours, produced a surplus, sold it on the open market, purchased some basic agricultural machinery with the proceeds, hired a little help – and made a profit.

 

Even in Tsarist times (when Poland was a part of the Russian Empire) the Kulaks were objects of envy and suspicion. After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, to be classed (and the word is used here advisedly) as a Kulak all-too-often meant persecution, confiscation, and, with the advent of “the collectivisation of agriculture” in late 1920s and early 30s, arrest, deportation, enslavement in the gulags [Soviet forced labour camps] and death.

 

With the Revolution’s ruthless elimination of the old Russian aristocracy, the Kulaks – though only marginally better off than their neighbours – had found themselves elevated to the status of the new capitalist class in the countryside. The smarter Bolsheviks had wanted to harness the drive and entrepreneurial flair of the Kulaks to secure the volume of exportable agricultural surpluses required to make socialism affordable for the rest of the USSR’s population.

 

Stalin was having none of it. The great Soviet experiment could not be held hostage to the capitalistic proclivities of its peasant farmers – no matter how economically productive. Agriculture must be collectivised and industrialised. Peasants must become workers. “Now”, Stalin boasted in 1929, “we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes [collective farms] and sovkhozes [state-owned farms].”

 

"Do Not Trust Him! This Czech poster, from the 1940s, depicts the Kulak as the most hardened enemy of Socialism.

 

Ancient history? Not a bit of it! The fate of farmers under conditions of “actually existing socialism” has stood as a cautionary tale to generation after generation of Kiwi cockies. The very idea of the state and its minions attempting to impose their will beyond the farm gate fills New Zealand farmers with a combination of fury and dread. Resistance, loud and implacable, has always been their first response.

Except, of course, when collective solutions were manifestly in the farmers’ interest – as was the case with the guaranteed prices and massive state subsidies that underpinned New Zealand agriculture from the 1930s to the 1980s. Like so many other Kiwi capitalists, farmers have never had a problem with socialising the costs and privatising the profits of their endeavours.

 

Well, hardly ever. When, in 1972, the National Government suggested the compulsory acquisition of the entire New Zealand wool clip, the parliamentary candidate for the Southland seat of Awarua, a farmer named Aubrey Begg, thundered that: “If this measure is allowed to proceed, we might as well paint a hammer and sickle on every barn door in New Zealand!” (And he was the Labour candidate!)

 

The farmers’ great fear of socialism is nowhere better displayed than in their unwavering refusal to recognise workers’ rights. Such recognition would only open the door to the trade unions – long resisted (think "Massey’s Cossacks") as both the harbingers and hand-maidens of every socialist burden ever imposed upon the long-suffering cockie.

 

One imagines the fate of the doomed kulaks looming large in the farmers’ fevered imaginations when, in 1936, the First Labour Government passed the Agricultural Workers Act. No doubt its provision of a minimum wage, four weeks paid holiday, and radically improved housing, for all farm workers, was regarded as proof positive that the Kiwi Kulaks’ one-way trip to the gulags was imminent!

 

Though the word “Kulak” may have faded from twenty-first century cockies’ vocabulary, their visceral fear of trade unionists and the socialist aspirations they embody, has not. Which is why any and every attempt to intrude regulations pertinent to the general welfare of all New Zealanders beyond the farm gate is invariably met with ferocious political opposition. Whether it be the public’s “right to roam”, the doomed “Fart Tax”, the Emissions Trading Scheme, or, in just the last few weeks, the Health and Safety Reform Bill, the cry of New Zealand’s cockies has been the same as the cry of the communist defenders of the Spanish Republic: ¡No pasarán! – They Shall Not Pass!

 

The rest of New Zealand must understand that allowing farm workers to manage their own health and safety would open the door for trade unionism – and socialism!

 

And what could possibly be more dangerous than that?!

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 25 August 2015.

Capitalism's Astonishing Victory

Last Line Of Defence: Western Leftists used to believe it was the Soviet Union's tanks and missiles that kept their capitalist masters in line. They were wrong. When the governments of "actually existing socialism" opened their cash-strapped economies to Western investors, the post-war security and affluence of the Western working-classes' were doomed. Between 1970 and 2000 the global workforce more than doubled, creating a buyers' market in labour that Western unions and their political parties were powerless to resist.

I’M NOT OFTEN ASTONISHED, but on Monday, Nigel Haworth, Professor of Human Resource Development at the University of Auckland, managed it. Speaking to Radio New Zealand’s Nine-to-Noon host, Kathryn Ryan, Professor Haworth set in historical context the unrelenting downward pressure on wages and conditions that has made the last three decades such a struggle for ordinary working people.

“When China and Eastern Europe, and Russia and India, joined the global economy; basically from the 1970s onwards”, Professor Haworth explained, “the global workforce doubled.

“It’s the most astonishing figure. The global workforce doubled, and the per capita level of capitalisation of that workforce halved. In other words, we moved into a massive international process of cheaper labour – which is what has allowed contracting-out and off-shoring to develop.

“We are now competing in a global market where cheaper labour is available, and it’s increasingly skilled cheaper labour in places like China and India. And you’re going to see that sort of pressure brought into our labour market. Which is why, I think, a country like New Zealand has to have a very clear strategy for high performance, high productivity workplaces, to counteract that tendency for lower and lower wages.”

Viewed from this perspective, the “opening” to capitalism of the old Soviet Empire, the People’s Republic of China and Nehru’s socialist India, has brought nothing but misfortune to the working-classes of the West. While that vast swathe of humanity remained inaccessible to the Western capitalist powers, Western workers were able to take full advantage of a sellers’ market in scarce human labour. But the moment the markets of the Soviet Empire, China and India were declared open to the investors (i.e. finance capitalists) of the West; not only were workers living under actually existing socialism doomed, but so were the prime beneficiaries of the post-war Keynesian settlement: the “free” workers of the West. Us.

What other outcome could there be? When, as Professor Haworth points out, the size of the labour force available to Western capitalists was expanding exponentially? How could trade unions mount a credible defence of their members’ incomes when all an employer had to do was threaten to (or actually) shift his factory off-shore to countries where labour could be hired, at a fraction of prevailing wage-rates, to do the same job?

Western Leftists used to believe that it was the Soviet Union’s tanks and nuclear warheads that kept their capitalist masters in line. That any attempt to destroy the unions, dismantle the welfare state, and generally immiserate the working-classes of the West would cause them to fling open the gates to the Reds. There was, of course, a grain of truth in this geopolitical speculation. What the Western Left failed to grasp, however, was that the cost of maintaining all those tanks and missiles was profoundly distorting the socialist economies. When Soviet citizens looked to the West they saw blue-jeans and stereos – consumer goods conspicuously absent from their own retail shelves. You can’t wear a tank, or dance to a missile.

Keynesianism had made the West wealthy enough to provide its workers with guns and butter, and its capitalists with investment funds too tempting for the cash-strapped economies of Eastern Europe to ignore. In the end, it wasn’t the immiserated workers of the West who flung open the fortress gates, it was the impoverished governments of the East.

The results are all around us. As the average living standards of the Third World have risen, those of the First and Second Worlds have fallen. If the dramatic increase in global wealth was being distributed equitably this would be a good thing. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Look at the Ports of Auckland, AFFCO’s meat-works, Oceania’s rest-homes – and  remember Professor Haworth’s remarkable facts and figures. This is what a buyers’ labour market makes inevitable.

It’s what unfettered Capitalism looks like. Those with readily marketable skills live inside it. Most of us live under it. An astonishingly tiny number call it their own.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 March 2012.

Kondratiev Comes Full-Cycle

TO hear the business reporters tell it, this "credit crunch", while serious, is not beyond the wit of the world’s economists to fix. With just a few billion – or trillion – more dollars, the financial markets will begin to free-up, and then, quite quickly, life will return to normal.

Our own Treasury officials confidently predict that New Zealand’s current recession will be shallow and short.

By 2010 – 2011 at the latest – we should all be out of the woods.

Let’s hope so.

Personally, I’m not quite so optimistic.

Why? Because earlier today I was reading about an economist who discovered the secret to predicting the economic future. And I’m not referring here to the immediate future – what’s going to happen to the stockmarket next week, or next month. No. I’m referencing a guy who was able to accurately predict what the global economy would look like ten, fifty, even a hundred years into the future.

His name was Nikolai Kondratiev.

In a saner, less bloodthirsty 20th Century, Kondratiev would have been celebrated as one of the Soviet Union’s greatest economists, and hailed throughout the world as the scholar who first discerned the long waves of economic expansion and contraction that periodicize the history of capitalism.

In the 20th century that actually happened, Kondratiev enjoyed only a few years of productive endeavour before falling victim to the political pathologies of Stalinism, dying in 1938, at the age of just 46, in front of an NKVD firing-squad.

His immediate offence was being too closely associated with the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) – an essentially social-democratic response to the abject failure of Lenin’s "war communism", which had brought the Soviet economy to its knees. Kondratiev believed that the development of heavy industry in the Soviet Union should only be attempted after the successful modernisation of its agriculture. Only when all Russians had enough to eat, and only upon the base of a thriving light industrial sector, producing agricultural equipment and consumer goods, should the growth of heavy industries be encouraged. Such thinking was anathema to Stalin and his henchmen, and Kondratiev was driven from his post as head of the Institute of Conjuncture and hauled off to the gulag.

His real crime, however, was to call into question the whole notion that economies could be made to perform according to the conscious interventions of human planners.

In his studies of capitalism he had discerned patterns of development that contradicted the linear notions of economic growth then favoured by his Soviet colleagues. Rather than progressing in a straight line, the evolution of the global capitalist economy appeared to describe a regular wave pattern, with a cycle of approximately fifty years.

For a detailed description of Kondratiev’s theories, follow the links here and here. Suffice to say that he and his followers, which included the great Czech-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, broke down the development of the global capitalist economy into five distinct waves of development.

The first wave, beginning in the late 18th Century was generated by the invention of the steam engine and the growth of factory-spun textiles.

The second wave commenced in the 1830s with the worldwide expansion of steam-powered transportation – especially railways.

The third wave got underway in the 1880s, driven by the growth of the steel, electricity, chemical and heavy-engineering industries.

The fourth wave witnessed the rise of the petrochemical, automobile manufacturing, and other mass production industries, which gathered momentum in the years immediately prior to World War I.

The fifth wave (our present) began in the 1970s with the revolution in telecommunications and information technology – giving birth to the age of the personal computer, cellphones, and the Internet.

Kondratiev’s waves have four distinct phases: Improvement – when the new inventions revolutionise the way people work and live. Prosperity – when the new technology has had time to bed-in and the wealth it is generating flows in all directions. Recession – when innovation slows and growth begins to falter. Depression – when wealth generation ceases and the economy collapses.

Kondratiev’s seminal work, The Major Economic Cycles, was published in 1925 – at the height of the Roaring Twenties – but working from his basic premises he was able to predict the Great Depression a full five years before it happened.

And Kondratiev’s foresight didn’t end with his prediction of the Slump. By plotting his fifty-year cycles along an axis divided into years, his disciples were confident of another steep slide into recession and depression in the late-1970s and 80s, and yet another big crash, timed for, yes, you guessed it, the start of the second decade of the 21st Century.

Historically, the contractionary phase of the Kondratiev Cycle tends to last not just for one or two years, but for anything from ten to fifteen years.

Kondratiev’s theory would suggest that times are about to get a whole lot worse before they get better.

Hence my pessimism.